Initiatleadershipguidance

Leadership is about vision and directions that steer the organization in the right direction.

Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about the future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation. 

The purpose of the book: “Leadership Master - Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity” is to convey the vision of digital leadership, share the insight about leadership maturity, and summarize five emergent digital leadership trends Here is the monthly tuning of digital leadership to celebrate #8200 blog postings.

         Leadership Guidance

Ingredientsinleadership As we live in the hyper-diverse and interdependent world, leaders today should lead by influence, not via brute force. They can bridge a variety of gaps, facilitate innovation agenda, and orchestrate business transformation insightfully. There is no one single attribute to digital leadership; there is a delicate mix of leadership, management, and interpersonal skills, along with a lot of different attributes, to improve leadership intelligence and maturity.

Initiateleadershipguidance The multidimensional digital effects provide impressive advantages in terms of the business speed, the abundance of information, and the quality of the workforce. If running the business in a transactional mode only can cause digital ineffectiveness in the long run. Today’s business leaders must be forethoughtful to read business sentiment with clarity, set guidance to drive changes, catalyze innovation, and solve problems effectively.

Inspirationalleadership Leadership is about directions and changes. The style of leadership may vary; the manifestation of leadership has different formulas; but the leadership essential is the same, inspiring, influencing and empowering.

Initiatecrossboundaryboardship We live in a hyper-connected and interdependent global society, the business is complex, the world is complex, and leadership is complex. Corporate board directors as senior leadership roles need to steer their organization in the right direction. Vision, multi-dimensional intelligence, decisiveness, justice, listening, integrity, empathy, drive, risk-taking, humility, perseverance, etc, are all crucial to shape their cross-boundary leadership maturity.

Innovateleadershipcrossglobe We live in a diverse global society with a multigenerational, multi-cultural workforce, and multipolar knowledge centers. Every nation as a sub-society develops their set of principles, laws, and practices that are best suited to them to make progress.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about 9300+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Initiatecustomercentricapplication

 It takes a logical scenario for integrating, optimizing and improving application portfolio effectiveness for realizing differentiated business value.

The digital era upon us is about innovation, customer-centricity, and choices. Customer-centric application is in strong demand and it is strategic to delight customers with new solutions, build differentiated competency to enable business strategy management. Applications have actually become an integral component of an enterprise’s flexibility and maturity.

Customer-centric applications enhance the business model: Strategic application development can add value to any organization if it understands the various needs and wants of end customers or internal users. Many times, a lack of user adoption is one of the issues to fail new applications. It’s important to empower customers, get them to choose the ideal solution for their work. One of the approaches to recharging the business model based on the technologic vision and on the mega-trends is to be able to develop customer centric applications, giving them an impression on how the organization can tailor their needs to provide personalized solutions effectively, increasing profitability.

Customer-centric applications extend business growth: Without customers, an organization cannot survive or create value and profitability. Customer-facing applications are critical as at the end of the day, they expand market share, generate revenue for the business applications, build the core competencies early enough to catch the emerging wave, gain marketing shares, and expedite business growth. When organizations can really understand or attempt to capture the insight about what customers actually want, it is when they can reach the “long-tail” customers by introducing new products or services, new methods of production, exploring new markets or utilizing new resources.

Customer-centric applications improve strategic flexibility and organizational maturity: It is all about understanding the essential customer requirements, why they're needed and what the benefits are. Business leaders today need to strike the right balance of ease of management and capacity elasticity, build comprehensive application management roadmaps, and manage a balanced application portfolio to achieve high performance results. Organizational strategic flexibility and people-centricity can be achieved by developing proper module design architecture, a balanced customer-centric application portfolio with reusability and customer-centric process flow, interweave all necessary business elements into the building blocks of the recombinant competencies with IT as “superglue.”

Forward-looking companies categorize or re-categorize business initiative portfolios to reflect the emerging strategic priority, and improve customer-centricity. Keep eyes on what matters, identify what delight customers the best, what generates the most value for the company and express that in strategic objectives, Knowing an application's utilization and resource consumption is necessary to make an objective assessment of the application portfolio effectiveness. It also helps to make good investment decisions. It takes a logical scenario for integrating, optimizing and improving application portfolio effectiveness for realizing differentiated business value and developing competitive business advantage consistently.

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Inquisitivebod

Inquisitive BoDs ask insightful questions and facilitate informative answers.

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. Here are the multiple perspectives of shaping an inquisitive boardroom.

   

 Inquisitive Boardroom

Inquisitive Board Generally speaking, Boards have a couple of main functions such as strategy oversight, governance practices, providing advice to executives, and resource provision, etc. So the Board should be knowledgeable enough to set broad strategic goals. They need to educate themselves by hearing different views about the organization, its environment, and strategic alternatives. Even the majority of BoDs are senior executives, they need to break the “status quo,” present learning agility and show the inquisitiveness to ask the tough and right questions. The board represents the ownership and they really cannot do a good job if they don't have the courage and knowledge to question and challenge and set the broad strategic goals, culture tones, and the digital theme of the boardroom itself. As an inquisitive BoD: How do you ask the tough questions?

Initiate Board’s Composition Inquiries Digital boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential, with the ability to adapt to the “VUCA” digital new normal. The board competency will directly impact business competency. Board must set an example of leadership which permeates through the entire organization. An effective and efficient board can reflect, identify and mind the gaps on their own boardroom turf, they also continue to add the new blood for enforcing digital acumen in the boardroom. Here is a set of digital board’s composition inquiries.

Inquiriesofbods We live in a world in which change is the norm, with increasing speed, one of the most important qualities of leadership is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. The corporate board as an advising role is responsible to provide an “outside-in” view of the business via multidimensional lenses, oversee business strategy and steer the organization in the right direction. They need to ask tough questions, challenge assumptions, ponder deeper about how to build a progressive board to catalyze digital transformation.

Inquisitive Board as Strategic Explorer Due to the “VUCA” characteristics of business dynamic, overloading information, and continuous disruptions as the new normal of business expansion, corporate boards should leverage multidimensional lenses to provide an “outside-in” view of the organization and steer the business in the right direction.

Insightful Board’s Composition InquiriesOrganizations today have to live up with the business dynamic which is uncertain, ambiguous, complex and flux. The rapid changes are touching every activity, function, business, and industry. The board of directors is the de facto guardians of modern organizations because they oversee strategy management and set the policy for driving changes. With more and more organizations are on the journey of digital transformation, from the board composition perspective, what are important perspectives to build a digital savvy board?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with 9300+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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Innovativegapbridge

No two people's realities, will be totally identical, at a given time; bridging gaps starts with -mindset. 

We live in the era of -

information abundance,

enrichment of -

human knowledge;

gaps are inevitable, 

if there is -

diversity of thinking,

difference between -

demand and supply;

discrepancy of-

talent for tomorrow,

and skills of today;

isn’t bridging-

the gap of -

opportunity between -

where you are and,

where you want to become -

a welcomed challenge?

Are you gap minders -

to inspire, innovate, improve?

Diverse people brainstorm,

actively to-

close cognitive gaps;

curious people-

ask, learn, understand,

to bridge the gap between-

questions & answers;

creative people think,

differently to-

mind innovation gap,

unbelievably;

intelligent people share -

knowledge to -

bridge understanding gaps,

cognitively;

insightful people interpret,

accurately to close-

perception and reality,

objectively;

courageous people act,

boldly to -

bridge current and future,

promptly;

cool-headed people,

induct, deduct to -

mind problem-solving gaps,

fluently;

the more gaps people can bridge,

the more significant influence -

they can make,

holistically.

No two people's realities,

will be totally identical,

at a given time;

bridging gaps starts with -

mindset;

be authentic to-

know who we are -

be open to–

appreciate-

our difference,

ask thought-provoking questions,

embrace diverse perspectives,

to close gaps between-

knowledge & true understanding,

inclusively

learn together,

grow together,

to make a better world,

collaboratively.

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Investmentlogic

Return on Investment should be expanded into a broader perspective which usually cannot be measured fully in time and dollars.

Venture investment is an interdisciplinary pursuit and cross domain effort. In many circumstances, business management probably wouldn't know where to invest in new capabilities, even if the organization thought there was any value justification for making the investment. 

It’s important to understand the multipath logic underneath, do return on investment analysis, clarify the multifaceted value it projects to create

Cost-benefit analytic logic of business investment: The management needs to enhance investment-strategic alignment by clarifying: What investments, or portfolios should you direct more assets to? Are they diversified? Each organization has specific, measurable goals and objectives they have to hit through investing. Return on investment is a ratio, a percentage of the dollar amount your company gains from investment efforts over what it initially spent in simple terms,

Great investors make an objective assessment of their investment portfolio for getting high ROIs. The cost-benefit analysis simply compares a project's cost to its anticipated financial benefit. It helps an organization assess if the business initiatives with associated technology or other future oriented perspectives is the right investment to be doing in the first place, for ensuring the expected return. Technically, to capture emerging business trends and make wise investment, develop predictive models and identify leading indicators to forecast business and staffing requirements.

Interdisciplinary logic of investment: There are different variables in investment related decision-making. Evaluate each of the variables from the perspective of current value or projected value. If cost benefit analysis is a sort of linear logic. Then in reality, to assess the multifaceted value (beyond economical value) of investment more objectively, it’s critical to clarify the nonlinear logic as the very clue hidden in varying circumstances across disciplinary domains horizontally for making wise investment. That requires an in-depth understanding of the business models, customers, and the markets the business operates in, understanding of the competitive landscape, keeping a medium/long term investment and performance horizon in mind.

Return on Investment should be expanded into a broader perspective which usually cannot be measured fully in time and dollars such as employee satisfaction, creativity, teamwork or culture evolution, etc. Interdisciplinary logic enables management to figure out what are the best methods for calculating ROI by raising questions, thinking outside the box, having a strategic understanding of the “to be” state of the company and holistic understanding of “as is” state of the organization. Insightful managers are able to review investment progress, deviations, and make more effective decisions for improving the overall investment management maturity.

Integration logic of portfolio investment: Business portfolio management is the foundation to build a set of organizational capabilities to enable strategy management. The management needs to make an objective assessment of the investment portfolio relative health status (risk, value, strategic importance) of each of the portfolios by prioritizing right and linking the business strategy to investment goals or business benefit. Besides financial results, it’s also important to leverage integration logic for evaluating the overall business value of a portfolio from investment perspectives, such as quality, stakeholders satisfaction, cultural impact, societal value, etc.

There are different types of investment portfolios, each with a different purpose and function. You integrate when a justification can be made for doing so. It’s crucial to clarify logic underneath by doing analysis of total cost, total value, and total impact to them, truly facilitating meaningful dialogues, enabling better, faster decision making and effective portfolio management to ensure that the strategy potential is achieved solidly. It’s about investing money, resources, talent effectively in achieving high ROI, and getting higher than expected performance results.

The business ecosystem is full of opportunities and risks. The success of investment is usually based on how to solve certain problems, enable business growth, play the number game wisely to demystify the puzzle of investment. The Return On Investment value proposition should be an overall assessment based on the combination of cost, schedule, quality, performance, and satisfaction of the customer, and stakeholders.

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Innercapacityvscapability

 Capability is the ability to do something. Capacity is the throughput of something. 

The purpose of the book “Digital Capability - Building Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency “ is to provide an insightful understanding of assessing, developing, and managing organizational capabilities in a structural way. 

The organization’s competency is based on a set of cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. The high-mature organizational capability is the digital business differentiator, to keep the business unique, competitive, and innovative, to improve business maturity significantly.

The capability views enable dot connections and help the business identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build Lego-like capabilities into core business competency and improve the success rate of strategy execution and overall business maturity.

Capacity vs.  Capability 

Innercapacity Capacity is the management process to planning, scaling up by using resources and time effectively. Capacity management makes business management more effective, efficient, and under control. It’s important for business leaders to keep processes transparent, enforce accountability at all levels by knowing what you are doing, clear leadership at all levels and enhance governance to improve organizational manageability.

Innercapacityplanning Capacity implies quantity, throughput is a quantity. Capacity Management refers to a process used to manage assets, resources, talent and time. A process which lacks sufficient resources to do a given amount of work is a lack of capacity.

Innercapability Capabilities are the abilities to achieve certain results. The high-mature set of business capabilities can make organizations more adaptable to implement their strategy. In order to improve business performance and maturity, upgrade organizational capabilities with repurpose, realignment, and reconfiguration. The goal is to ensure that strategic goals can be accomplished quickly and consistently and reach the next business growth cycle effortlessly.

Innercapability Business capability is an organized "ability" within a company and takes hard work to put in place. Capability can contain many services, processes, resources, structures, and functionalities to perform a set of activities for producing successful outcomes, whether financial, brand, or double bottom line. The successful businesses are the ones that have learned how to implement change time after time after time, and build a set of solid business capability to drive desired change or leaping progression.

Capability vs. Capacity Capability is the ability to do something. Capacity is the throughput of something. An organization might have the capability to manufacture widgets and the capacity to manufacture 100 per hour. Adding Capacity provides you the opportunity to do more of what you are already doing. Adding Capability provides a differentiation and the more ability to do things that you weren’t able to do previously.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9300th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 29 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Initiatecollaborationframework

Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual interaction and harmony between humans.

Collaboration happens in that space between people in relationships receptively and thoughtfully interacting with interest and caring for one another's needs and activities. Collaboration is the route towards revitalizing the digital workforce to be future-ready for unlocking collective human potentiality. 

Building and sustaining dynamics in a workforce are about collaboration with people at any level, especially cross functionally. It’s critical to build an effective collaboration framework, set rules, align people, process and technology to bring people together for a clearly defined vision, create business synergy and achieve strategic goals effortlessly.

Collaboration rules: As collaboration creates a sense of belonging, seeking out help and harnessing mass collaboration. The purpose of setting collaboration principles is to build an effective digital workplace in which collaboration and sharing are the norms, focusing on harnessing cross-functional collaboration through iterative communications, robust processes, and efficient technological tools, to achieve certain values. It’s important to cultivate the zest for breaking down silos, working collaboratively, generating new ideas or solving complex problems effortlessly.

Cross-silo or cross-divisional collaboration is crucial to build dynamic digital capabilities. The hybrid collaboration rules such as inclusiversity (inclusion + diversity), coorpetion (collaboration + competition), etc, enables the management to bring the right people with complementary skills together quickly to make progress sooner, faster decisions and access to the right resources easily, figure out better ways to solve problems smoothly.

Collaboration process: For all meaningful human social interactions and collaboration, there are processes underneath, so there are many touch points in processes that will take us into the collaboration world. The process is simply a mechanism to define how it's distributed and how to know when it's done. There are event driven processes and people-centric process management. Social business process management resides at the intersection of process and collaborative activity. Collaborative process management supports more-effective process execution through the use of social software tools that augment human actions to better mirror the way work is performed, while also providing visibility to the work. It's critical to embed collaboration into the pattern of work, follow collaboration rules: be inclusive rather than exclusive, encourage creative thinking, brainstorming and knowledge sharing.

Collaboration software, tools: The emerging digital technologies such as enterprise social computing could be effective tools to break down a hierarchical culture and harness cross-functional interaction, communication, and collaboration. This includes the ability to support all sorts of collaboration activities, etc. It’s important to create a holistic process design that is open to influence and change from a variety of perspectives (for example, customers, partners, suppliers, employees and the collective).The focus ought to be on how the work gets done more effectively. Technically, it's about understanding the nature correlation & connection of people, process, and technology. If traditional business process management is a bit artificial, then collaborative social process management seems more natural & artistic. Using social platforms and collaborative tools as part of the design to improve business holism and innovativeness.

Collaboration teams: High mature organizations treat employees, customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents to enforce cross-boundary interrelations, interactions, and mass collaboration for co-creating ideas, co-solving complex problems. Every collaborative team will be different and hence, produce different results. Don't expect your collaboration to be the same. To catalyze innovation, sometimes, vulnerability is key! As you need to be vulnerable to hearing the ideas challenged from a viewpoint different from your own for spurring creative insight.

Orchestrate competitive teams, find your own balance and you will find your innovation. In the spirit of 'being the change," it is imperative that we are willing to seek out help and collaboration as we work to generate new ideas or solve problems. When organizations orchestrate a broader ecosystem beyond functional, business, industrial, or geographical borders, the collaborative or coaching management styles are required to move to higher-performing dynamic ecosystems with seamless collaboration and knowledge transfer innovation.

There are many reasons to collaborate and there are numerous ways to collaborate for achieving desired results and amplifying collective human potential. Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual interaction and harmony between humans. It is important to build an effective platform and  figure out a more efficient way of applying collaboration philosophy to foster cross-functional interaction to boost energy, enforce learning, harness innovation and accelerate performance.

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Informationintegration

A healthy Information Management cycle makes information available and useful, store, consolidate, integrate, and refine it into intelligence,

The aim of modern Information Management has often been described as getting the right information to the right person, in the right format and medium, at the right time, in order to make the right decisions. 

The value of information technology is qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization.

 

Information Integration

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

Unconventionalintegrators With abundant information, fast-paced changes and frequent disruptions often caused by emerging digital technologies, many of organizations across the vertical industries are running in between - the mix of old and new; the different divisions within an organization are running in silos, each of them has their own set of knowledge, capabilities, subculture, and speed.

unifiedinformationarchitecture Business operates in the real world, and the real world is muddy, chaotic, with overwhelming information and emerging events and activities. There are always different complexities at a different time or dimension and there are multilateral management approaches to run an information intensive business.

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

Integration II If you look at a company as a collection of subsystems with varying business elements, there are different complexities at a different time or dimension and there are multilateral integration to achieve business coherence. However, in reality, many organizations are running as a sum of pieces, not an integral whole. That significantly downgrades organizational performance, agility, and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9300th 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 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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Initiategrcinfluence

 Integrated GRC includes more vital business perspectives, each providing a check and balance on harnessing strong management disciplines to lift up corporate agility and maturity.

The governance is an organizational capability for risk mitigation, improving organizational effectiveness. Corporate risk management ensures you have the right level of risk control; corporate compliance enforces laws and regulations. That’s why they usually have been put into the overarching GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) umbrella. 

There are potentially multiple joint processes that could define the scope of Governance, Risk, and Compliance. GRC is not a single process, but a collection of processes with different roles defined and mechanisms embedded, such as roles and technologies to improve organizational effectiveness, agility, efficiency, and maturity.

Governance: Fundamentally, governance is about enforcing decision effectiveness, cross-functional management alignment, improving transparency and accountability, getting people, culture, process, and performance right. Strong corporate governance needs to have direct links to each crucial business management discipline and its processes to make sure that management is doing its job properly. 

If there's a problem with trust or lack of structure, then governance will suffer, because motivations are not aligned across organizational boundaries. Structured governance enforces the breadth and depth of business management with seamless alignment. It’s the act of guiding, influencing, and regulating the decisions and behaviors of the entire workforce to accelerate business performance.

Risk management: Risk management permeates across organizations and should not be a separate function at all. Enterprise wide risk management as a discipline with consistency, intends to manage enterprise risk systematically, streamlining business processes to ensure you have right risk management controls, develop an effective risk framework, and set the right risk appetite for improving enterprise risk management maturity. 

It’s important to scrutinize process, structure, technology, people, along other critical success factors of the business, and collect feedback from the risk management process for increasing risk intelligence. Risk management systems and processes need to be highly automated, strategic, and transparent. Besides identifying risks, spotting opportunities, put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings, embed risk identification and assessment in operational processes and multiple management disciplines to achieve risk management excellence.

Compliance: Compliance Management covers all relevant laws, regulations, internal standards and policies. At the strategic level, compliance requires a forward-looking strategic perspective to deal with unprecedented uncertainty and ambiguity, to deliver real-time accountability and transparency across regulatory areas. It stands to reason to assume that the laws, regulations, internal standards and policies imposed on- or adopted by a company are the starting point for the definition of any underlying operational and system process to remain compliant. 

Compliance is very much a strategic issue and companies that do not recognize this are blindfolding to a great extent. At a high maturity level, compliance should be more than just looking at internal directives, but looking at the outside world as well. It is about looking at how the world and society are developing. A good compliance system must have morals and ethics incorporated into it. The effective compliance tool monitors change, enables information accountability, audits, measures the impact, and implements appropriate corrective actions to improve corporate maturity!

Governance today as a discipline is a living breathing entity which continually requires stroking and attention. Some old school of management thinks GRC is only for the bottom line, it is actually an enabler for business growth and innovation. Governance, risk and compliance should work really closely in order to create value. Integrated GRC includes more vital business perspectives, each providing a check and balance on harnessing strong management disciplines to lift up corporate agility and maturity

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Innercapacity

To reach the stage of business fluidity and resilience, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension, strengthen organizational capacity and build business competency.

Capacity is the management process to planning, scaling up by using resources and time effectively. Capacity management makes business management more effective, efficient, and under control. It’s important for business leaders to keep processes transparent, enforce accountability at all levels by knowing what you are doing, clear leadership at all levels and enhance governance to improve organizational manageability.

Change capacity: Organizations have limited assets, resources, budget, talent, and time, capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate change initiatives around continuous improvement. The corporate management is able to push the right buttons by setting guidelines, building and scaling change capacity accordingly.

In practice, to make capacity planning effective and practical, it is important to get the bigger picture, make decisions about the ideal workload, be clear on what, who, when, where, and how to achieve business goals based on the available resources, talent, to maximize multifaceted corporate value

Capacity investment: To make capacity planning effective and practical, the management should do the information based forecast, ensure that business investment and application development does not proceed without a "clear business rationale"; work out if it makes financial sense, shorten the business initiative management cycle.

The organizational management across the functional boundaries create liaison and business partnership, figure out what the organization needs, share unique business insight as to what capacity can provide, what capacity is needed for the future development of the corporation. It’s important to retool corporate management to model powerful collaboration, and ensure that the business capacity plans and investment are in line with the corporate direction to achieve well-defined strategic goals and realize the vision of the company.

Capacity for competency development: The capacity can reflect the gap in capability. A set of related capabilities with focus can be developed into core competency. The management should have a big picture of what’s going on so that they can justify the capacity planning properly to improve business competency development effectiveness. Take a deep look at the underlying business functions and processes, take a wider look around at what’s going on inside and outside the organization and how it might affect the organization. Make sure that corporate capability planning is effective to build corporate competency and improve business advantage for the intermediate or long term.

Capacity modeling is one of the activities that are required for a high performing organization. Quality capacity planning program will enable the business to switch to a proactive mode and bring you in control when experiencing high velocity and uncertainty; presenting a willingness to imaginatively explore, an ability to evaluate the imaginative proposals for “appropriateness” and a capacity to translate ideations into some form of unambiguous approach for problem-solving. With effective capacity management, you will move closer to enhance organizational agility, harmony, and efficacy.

Business transformation represents a break with the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. To reach the stage of business fluidity and resilience, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension, strengthen organizational capacity and build business competency for leading incremental or transformative change smoothly.

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Uncoverlogicunderneathdecision

Both the art of intuition and the science of analytics have the role to play in making effective decisions and solving problems smoothly.

"Decision Masters” refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, and take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. 

Decision Masters also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively.

Uncover Logic Underneath

Innerlogicunderneath Organizations and societies become overly-complex, decision-making becomes tougher and problems-solving is challenging. Every meaningful thing has logic in it; people with strong logic get the whole picture as opposed to others that can't seem to get a grasp on the problem. Strong logic enables people to infer and defer, preliminarily understand the extent of any problems or conditions, grasp truths, discover facts, meanings, or relationships in improving decision coherences and problem-solving effectiveness.

Unpuzzling“Nonlinear” Business Logic Behind Digital OrganizationBusiness logic is a blanket term that covers several very different types of components such as business rules, workflows, algorithms, and integration logic. The very natural attempt of humans to take powerful techniques such as linear mathematics or logic and apply it to the world very quickly comes up against insurmountable difficulties.

Integrating decision logic In the world where change is significantly speeding up, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. Decision-making is difficult due to varying reasons such as uncertainty and ambiguity of business circumstances, fear of failures, unsure about priority, unconscious bias, lack of knowledge or profound thinking process, etc. Thus, it’s crucial to take logical steps in achieving decision smartness.

InitiatelogicalDecision-Making Scenario Either at the individual level or corporate level, people have to make decisions, large or small even on a daily basis. The precursor to 'What is the decision' is 'Why do we need a decision', which is preceded by the framing question 'What is the problem that we need to solve.' And then technically, HOW to make better decisions, Who are the effective decision makers? Which decision style do you have, WHERE is the decision point, and the big WHEN - Can you make the right decisions? So the issue is: decision power is a mind-power. How to improve it?

Intuitive & Informative Decision-Making Decision making is both art and science. People rely on their gut if they are trained or experienced, first responses don't have time to weigh all the factors in a decision and are trained to make fast decisions. Both the art of intuition and the science of analytics have the role to play in making effective decisions and solving problems smoothly.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9300 blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.


Decision Master Book Summary

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Decision Master iBook Order Link


Decision Master Introduction

Decision Master Chapter 1 Decision Intelligence

Decision Master Chapter 2 Decision Principles

Decision Master Chapter 3 Digital Decision Styles

Decision Master Chapter 4 Decision Pitfalls

Decision Master Chapter 5 Decision Maturity

Decision Master Conclusion Five Pillars in Achieving Decision Excellence

Decision Master Quotes Collection 1

Decision Master Quotes Collection 2

Decision Master Quotes Collection 3

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Initiativesforcustomercentricity

A truly successful customer experience is the one that delivers excellence what the brand promises.

We live in the digital age of innovation, choice, and empathy. Customer Experience is an amazing opportunity to differentiate from the competition. Great customer experience has become the norm, "understanding your clients," "putting yourself in their shoes," "going above expectations,"etc, are invaluable credos to improve people-centricity. The path to customer-centric won’t be straight or flat, but a transformation journey with bumps or curves.

Put emphasis on customer-centric innovation and deliver solutions to tailor their personal needs: Without customers, an organization cannot survive. Gaining customer empathy will help organizations understand and orchestrate business through outside-in customer view. Point out that customer inquiries are not only support related, but can also foster better ways to solve their problems with personal touch.

Either strategically or technically, building customer centricity consistently in a way that delivers the right experiences to the right customers at the right times is, in most companies, enormously complicated. The business management and staff across the organizational hierarchy have to continuously understand its customer needs and requirements, also have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability.

Orchestrate all critical components together into a great customer experience: "Voice of the Customer" program are very important factors that you do research into what the customer really wants. In reality, how your team handles customers from their first touch through to their returning loyalty is fraught with traps and challenges. Everybody should be working together within that company toward a common goal of achieving customer-centricity. The holistic solution to meet customers’ personalized needs has to be encouraged, either for optimizing customer experience or increasing customer loyalty.

Without customers, there is no business. How can every one from each silo start to talk, feel and think with the customer's shoes and glasses on, set the empathy map from each touch point to drive real empathy and understanding. Customer Experience Management is a nurturing, developing, building block that takes the ordinary to the sublime customer satisfaction. Once you have this basic premise right, everything flows naturally and exceptional customer-centric solutions will be the automatic result.

Set both strategic and tactical level customer experience metrics in place that keep a pulse on the inner workings of the business: In order to build a customer-centric organization, a clear understanding of how customer value creation enhances the business model and increases profitability. You can only manage what you measure. It requires consistently digging deeper and having the right metrics in place that keep track of customer satisfaction. How many customer touch points or processes are included, how many staff people are involved? Is it possible to measure it at each touch point? What activities can be done to improve processes to save time and money?

A truly successful customer experience is the one that delivers excellence what the brand promises. It is important to set metrics to clarify the plan of customer-centric process implementation, control and measures. Select key performance indicators, develop a true measure of how well one understands their customers, measure how well you are delivering to your customers. The customer experiences they measure span the customer and product life cycles of their companies.

It's surprising to see how many companies still don't understand that their entire business is about understanding customers and their major task is to form a customer-centric organization always ready to support and deliver customer excellence across the entire value chain. Every situation has choices, every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns. The only way we get to understand these is by applying the higher level of thinking to deliver personalized solutions and improve customer satisfaction smoothly; from there, connect the higher purpose, core values, and the company's goals to deliver high performance results collaboratively.

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Initiatecruiticalchange

Business transformation is the change on a grand level and it is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity.

Cange is inevitable, organizational change has become a common practice within an organization, but too often changes are made as a reaction to outer impulses, crises, 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.

Initiate Critical Change 

Initiatechangeinspireinnovation In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, problems become over-complex and interconnected. Change is the new normal, but it is never for its own sake, but to solve problems large or small for generating multifaceted value.

Initiatecrucialchanges We are at the intersection of knowledge economy and creativity economy; chaos is sometimes the part of change scenario due to natural resistances or sometimes dysfunctional systems. Strategy execution is often multipath-driven; to deal with ambiguity scientifically, organizations today need to become more open and responsive, understand and work to influence business dynamics, envision alternative scenarios, and take actions step-wisely.

Initiatechangesii The exponential growth of information and frequent disruptions are the new normal. It is nevertheless true that the change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, continuously happening in such a dynamic environment. With the breakdown of physical barriers and blurred digital territories, organizations need to become more open, informative, and nimble to adapt to the dynamic environment.

Initiatechange iii The world has become much more complex and smaller all at once, the digital transformation has to go a few inches deeper and apply interdisciplinary knowledge to make leapfrogging business changes. The business will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their change capability, improve their business effectiveness, agility, and maturity. Can you see changes through a multidimensional lens?

Initiatechanges Change is inevitable, leaders and professionals must be comfortable with “VUCA” reality, broaden their outlook, envision the future, analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Make sure they first understand what it needs to change for, keep the end in mind, build change competency, take step-wise actions to drive change smoothly.

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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Initiateinnovationconnectivity

You have to manage innovation in the right way with the right elements strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business performance results.

The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile. We need different perspectives, different knowledge, and different ways to solve problems. We should connect wider dots, take alternative paths of experimenting, adventuring, and exploring the digital new normal, to achieve well-set business goals. 

Innovative organizations deploy a range of different management disciplines, technologies, processes, and structural solutions. Innovation is a mindset and a prerequisite to run a sustainable business these days.


Innovation & leadership: Innovation is fundamentally about challenging common beliefs, breaking assumptions, and conventional understanding of problems. Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple or complex problems creatively. Thus, having more assumptions uncovered will lead to greater innovation. Innovative leadership is in a strong demand to bridge cognitive gaps, amplify collective creativity, inspire creative culture, and catalyze innovation. An innovative leader can ask open questions to attract fresh insight and leverage all sorts of information to perceive the big picture into which the knowledge fits, demonstrate transdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional experience to connect meaningful dots, promote a healthy climate for innovation, inspire team members to create a portfolio of new ideas, concepts, and scenarios, coach them on innovation management practices and how to overcome the barriers to innovation success.

Innovation leadership is about a clear vision and a planned attitude of the free mind, optimistic mentality, and risk-taking attitude. The difference between innovative leaders and conventional managers is not about how many answers you have, but about how well you can ask great questions to embrace diverse perspectives and generate fresh ideas. Innovative leaders can strike the right balance of confidence and humility; knowledge and imagination for harnessing creativity, present high-level innovation competency to accelerate innovation performance and set the tone for cultural evolution and business transformation.

Innovation & Intelligence: innovation is about solving problems alternatively. Intelligence is a capacity to understand problems and it’s often multidimensional. Business intelligence provides information on a user digestible and understandable level to generate fresh ideas, and implement them by mixing the sources and forming formulas; prioritizing business problems or opportunities and solving them creatively. Either individually or collectively, creative intelligence is multifaceted. It's about thinking beyond conventional wisdom, visualizing data, creating novel ideas, searching for insights, making validation and predictability, understanding customers’ needs and wants; grasping opportunities to innovate products and services offerings, and designing new business models continually.

Information is an intensive puzzle piece of innovation. There are some critical pieces of information needed for connecting wider dots to spur innovation and accelerate idea validation. Information is useless if it is not being used to refine business intelligence, generate ideas, and achieve the business purpose. The information system as the backbone of innovation management helps to optimize the usage of information, enable users to visualize data, create novel ideas, and implement them smoothly, lead smart actions and improve innovation performance.

Innovation & collaboration: Nowadays, innovation not only has a broad scope but also has deep context. Many innovation efforts are complex, involving cross-disciplinary collaboration, and seamless teamwork. Creative connectivity across the business ecosystem means to have a better ability for dots connection across knowledge boundaries to spark great ideas and scale up innovation impact. Thus, it’s important to develop a powerful innovation navigation system which involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for discovering emerging innovation opportunities, and preventing potential risks.

It’s also imperative to build a high-innovative team composed of people who can generate lots of original ideas, and it's equally important to have people who can navigate innovation strategy, implement these ideas, and evaluate innovation performance. Innovation is an interdisciplinary management process. Innovation management process needs to be antifragile, but not too rigid. It stands in between management, economy, technology, psychology, sociology, and law etc. With emerging digital enterprise collaboration platforms and tools, cross-functional communication, both vertical and horizontal penetration, and social engagement are the new normal in the effective digital workplace to encourage innovative collaboration, and improve innovation success.

With the increasing speed of changes and continuous digital disruptions, businesses today face fiery competitions and rapid digital paradigm shifts either technologically or economically, innovation is no longer “nice to have,” but must have differentiated business capability. Innovative leaders and professionals lead organizations and our societies forward with leapfrogging changes to unleash collective potential courageously. Forward-looking businesses management need to create a business environment in which people are encouraged to think creatively and solve problems differently. You have to manage innovation in the right way with the right elements strategically and systematically to achieve consistent business performance results.

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Initiateglobalview

Innovative global professionals should shape their perspective of value proposition, life experience, world view; culture quintessential, as well as education viewpoints.

The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Digital is the age of creativity and innovation, creativity is the most desired trait for digital leaders and professionals today, and innovation is the light every organization is pursuing. 

Which themes shall you set to advocate digital transformation? How to lead toward the digital future effortlessly?

 

    Innovative Global View

Innovativeglobalviews A professional is an individual who strives to represent professional competency and delivers quality. High professionalism is an important quality for today’s multigenerational, multicultural and multi-devicing workforce to realize collective potential and overcome common challenges. Innovative global professionals should shape their perspective of value proposition, life experience, world view; culture quintessential, as well as education viewpoints. Professionalism can be ripened to maturity through the combination of authenticity, capability, quality, credibility, and accountability.

Innovativeglobalviewsii We live in the hyper-conencted global society, business leaders and professionals need to shed the tendency to share their unique viewpoints on common concerns, leadership perspectives on value proposition, life experience, world view; information technology, culture quintessential, as well as education, to bridge the multitude of differences, shape the true global mindset and professional competency for building an advanced human society.

Initiate Multiple Views to Describe the Future State of Business The business transformation journey is full of velocity and uncertainty, thus, a clear vision is in demand and it’s important to capture multiple views to describe the future state of the business. You will also need to tailor the communication of these views to different stakeholders, focus on defining what would appear to be the goals of the business in x years and how the organization and systems would be structured to meet that.

Initiate System View of the World Both business and the world become over complex and interconnected, the linear thinking often applied in the industrial age seems to be too limited to see the intriguing and interwoven picture of the world. When we do linear thinking, we do not see the impacts and consequences of our thinking and actions socially, environmentally, locally and globally. The systems thinker looks at their business as being part of a larger system, the socio-economic system, which is part of a larger system - the natural environment. So is a systems view of the world needed? How can this kind of thinking and perception become mainstream and promoted in such a way that it is adopted as a serious alternative to linear thinking?

Initiate the diverse BA-Driven Views to Shape the Digital Organization With “VUCA” digital new normal, businesses have been faced with increasingly more complex and pressing problem-situations, they should adapt to dynamically changing environments. Thus, the Business Architecture role in designing and planning future enterprise will be both interesting and challenging; from inside-out to outside-in, and from industrial-segregation to digital modularization.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 7 million page views with about #9300th blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 29 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

Read More