Welcome to our blog, the digital brainyard to fine tune "Digital Master," innovate leadership, and reimagine the future of IT.

The magic “I” of CIO sparks many imaginations: Chief information officer, chief infrastructure officer , Chief Integration Officer, chief International officer, Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Influence Office etc. The future of CIO is entrepreneur driven, situation oriented, value-added,she or he will take many paradoxical roles: both as business strategist and technology visionary,talent master and effective communicator,savvy business enabler and relentless cost cutter, and transform the business into "Digital Master"!

The future of CIO is digital strategist, global thought leader, and talent master: leading IT to enlighten the customers; enable business success via influence.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Inner

It’s important for people to discover their inner self, develop multidimensional thinking, hybrid skills, or ambidextrous capabilities, growing talent holistically.

E
very person or organization has a story: a set of beliefs, values, myths, histories, and judgments about the inner world of work, and the external environment around them. The world we see is dependent on the lens of proximity, the openness of mind and the perception of eyes. 

Some perceive the world as black and white, others see the full spectrum of color. It further reflects into our inner world, to shape our viewpoints, make discernment, and influence the surrounding distinctively.

It's interesting to know how to listen to your inner voice and decide promptly: People are intelligent creatures, they also have gut-feelings, like the inner compass that gives direction to people in making the decisions. Are they able to listen to the inner voice, and create some space for realigning what is important to them? To step away from the normal noises and let your inner voice speak out. Gut feeling and other implicit cognition are very good at prediction about who they are, and how they make decisions as long as the environment is highly predictable and stable.

Sometimes people have a tendency to look for the information that confirms the decision they already want to make and disregard what speaks against it. For their inner compass to work correctly, they should have the right balance of the depth and breadth of technical and business knowledge; listen to the inner voice: what do they value; what’s the goal or purpose? How to balance out the biases from which the poor decisions are made? So they can think independently; act authentically, decide intuitively and initiate changes motivationally.

Inner and outer self is the struggle between what we know as reality and what we feel as our connection to the wholeness within: Knowledge professionals think, create, and self-actualize by discovering their inner self, architecting themselves, refining their talent, experimenting with new things and exploring the art of possibility. They sense themselves and that's all they need to let their thoughts and behavior work to keep motivated. Assessing a person’s motivational potential is how well he/she can adapt to personal drive and focus on performing well in new and changing contexts.

The inner wholeness is a constant which relates to universal knowledge, but each of us has to find this constant for ourselves. We can help each other as it is the same truth for all of us but to consume truths requires letting go of reality, or setting aside the climate while we deliberate. Professionals as people do something because they enjoy or want to, not just for economical value, but for the benefits it produces, the progress it achieves, and the satisfaction it gives them- the wholeness of self or the purpose of life; keep recreating themselves constantly.

It is important to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer elements in leading changes:
Intension is people’s inner drive to do certain things and achieve more. Our intention to change is to generate value and make a better future. It’s the inner feeling and a persistent attitude about “we can do better than before,” inspire people to learn constantly, capture fresh insight towards the future, and lead change proactively. In fact, how we behave as individuals in regard to our inner world is just as important and even more important than how we behave in regard to our outer world.

To be conscious of progress we need to make, it is to be aware and engaged with both the inner world of thought, feeling, and the exterior world of experience and relationship to make choices or take actions. Too often people take the easy path, without spending enough time to understand what’s going on underneath, the cause and effect of problems. To succeed, businesses need a unified “one sight” focus for driving change, but understand both inner and outer elements in leading changes smoothly.

It’s important for people to discover their inner self, develop multidimensional thinking, hybrid skills, or ambidextrous capabilities, growing talent holistically. Organizational leaders and professionals today need to listen to inner voices, demonstrate the tough character, hard & soft skill sets, as well as a set of core professional competencies to make wise choice, lead progress smoothly.

Inquestlogic

It's always about the questions, and inquest logic underneath to attract great answers and fresh insight unbelievably.
There is known known, known unknown, unknown unknown. For every digital leader or professional today, there is time to ask, and there is time to answer. Asking questions means we have intellectual curiosity, are willing to learn, embrace other people’s viewpoints, develop inquest logic, brainstorm and capture fresh insight constantly. 

It's not a matter of whether you should ask or tell more. It's important to do what is right in a situation; discussing things as appropriate, and gaining insight collectively. So you keep professional integrity that works to raise questions on your authority or gratification with power and humility.

Inquest logic shapes a clear vision; vision further clarifies the hidden logic to see things differently: Look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. Asking questions is a powerful way to gain complementary viewpoints and close gaps regardless of whether it's related to knowledge, culture, or the worldwide difference.

Observe, perceive, and pay attention to the myriad of internal, external, national, or global forces that define and influence the way people do work or run business these days. Insightful people are inquisitive, intrigued by complex reality, ask great questions to themselves, to circumstances, to the media, to experiences, to co-shaping a clear vision of the preferred future. They are able to clarify hidden logic to understand comprehensive issues, and pull important things into that direction, to make desired change and influence.

Inquest logic interweaves imagination into innovative ideas via asking open-ended questions such as “Why, Why Not, What If, How about”: Being innovative does not mean you are completely spontaneous or lack logic. Creativity generates lots of ideas based on creative intelligence with hidden logic. In fact, creativity and logic are actually the “hybrid truth.”

Be inquisitive to ask open and thought-provoking questions to bring a multifaceted perspective, validate how thorough and deep your team's thinking is on a particular issue as well as the psychology behind innovation. It takes logic to recognize, filter, or deal with ideas, and implement them effectively.

Inquest logic digs into complexity and guides people through it:
Things or issues are multilayer and interdependent nowadays, contextualization aids us in understanding what’s relevant and what’s not. To solve complex problems, inquest logic is a great way to overcome bias by appreciating different viewpoints and enhancing interdisciplinary understanding.

Inclusion enhances inquest logic, particularly to get diverse people to come up with their own answers to solve problems or overcome common human challenges collaboratively. Initiate open dialogues. find common ground; turn around the tough situations, and enjoy the challenges of complex problem-solving. When you gain new knowledge and when you change your understanding of the past, new possibilities and interpretations of them emerge in the future unimaginably.

If there are no questions, there will be no answers. An inquisitive mind with confidence does not accept things at face value and keep discovering a better or an alternative solution. It's always about the questions, and inquest logic underneath to attract great answers and fresh insight unbelievably. How can all of us learn that answers are not ends, but the means for greater inquiry? The more we question, the more we know, we learn and thereafter we teach and spread our learning to co-develop an advanced human society.

Innovatebod

As one of the strong top leadership pillars, corporate boards need to be more innovation-driven and information savvy, insightful and influential.
M
odern 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 innovative boardroom.

             Innovate BoDs


Innovateboard In a world of rapid changes, senior leaders like BoDs look into an unknown future and attempt to define the landscape with its opportunities and risks. They can make better influence on managing uncertainty, improving strategic decision effectiveness over volatility, simplifying complexity, anticipating changes, and steering the organization in the right direction.

Initiativesofbods Organizations across the industrial sectors are on the journey of business transformation. The abundant information and the latest digital technologies open the new possibilities to communicate and collaborate cross-border seamlessly. Innovative BoDs should bridge a variety of differences, guide the senior management team through effective questioning, coaching, advising, and assessment of the business strategy execution, and bring the fresh insight of corporate governance.

InfluentialBoDs Business world becomes much more complex and much more ambiguous, requiring much more world-changing-acts proactively. As one of the strong top leadership pillars, corporate boards need to be more innovation-driven and information savvy, insightful and influential.

Initiativesofbods The ever-changing business dynamic brings significant opportunities and responsibilities for business growth and innovation. Top directorship roles such as board directors are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, envisioning and leading the business towards its future forethoughtfully.

Inquiriesofbods Nowadays, it is increasingly difficult to run a successful business due to various factors caused by rapid changes, fast growth of information, and emerging technologies. Building a high-performance corporate board requires multifaceted thinking, dot-connecting, asking insightful questions, taking a balance of multiple perceptions in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieving expected business results.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with 10800+ 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.

Infuseinnovativeness

An innovator can shape great vision, generate fresh ideas, and unique insight all the time.

Global world is diversified, there are creative people in almost every profession and location. The most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and unleash creative potential to make progress. 


Recognize great innovations and inspire creativity all the time. There are healthy psychologies that are important for being innovative, such as being imaginable, inquisitive, proactive, knowable, having strong desire to be creative and informative, and being at the right place at the right time.

Freshness of creativity can infuse passion, demonstrate unique strength: In the world of dynamic changes, we are all unique human beings with different characters, talents, perceptions, and personalities. The actual mental understanding and subsequent manifestations in action will be different for each individual. People need to keep their knowledge fresh, connect wider dots, and concentrate their energy on developing their innovative competency.

Individually, in order to tap your potential and create a unique image, investigate your passion, discover your talent. Collectively, build a compelling team with complementary mindsets and skill sets, diverse background, experience, to broaden vision, and deepen understanding of critical issues, build innovation strength and capacity. Not just put eyes on the competitors, but enforce creative intelligence and unlock collective potential continuously.

Innovation is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness: Creativeness derives from one’s ability to let go of assumptions and stigmas we place on objects-things, people, ideas, functions, and has a vision of purpose besides what is already obvious. Being innovative is a sort of a disruptive mind to break down silos and convey different perspectives. Because real learning is always a rebellion, not just about “being knowledgeable,” but being able to expand the boundaries of knowledge, often at the edge of things. It’s the inner feeling and a persistent attitude about “we can do better than before.”

Innovation leads us to the understanding of wholeness, the issue of the brightness of innovation with the paradigm shift from process-awareness to people-centricity. The willingness to fail and try again in order to succeed one day. Innovation is essentially about problem-solving at various levels, and to solve a problem implies a wish to make something, or everything, better. That, in itself, seems to lead to understanding the wholeness.

Infuse innovativeness into every aspect of the organization and human society: In a world that has been transformed by information technologies, many old and powerful hierarchies became commoditized,” make a paradigm shift from industrial economy to knowledge economy to creative economy. Contemporary companies have blurred the functional borders, business, geographical or industrial territories, focusing on information fluidity, insight enrichment, innovation abundance, and influential reformation.

In fact, innovation is the only solution to overcome common challenges, solve existing or emerging complex problems in front of human society. Contextual understanding, interdisciplinary knowledge, efficient collaboration platforms and tools, structural management practices, etc, are all important factors in innovation management. Organizations today proactively look for opportunities to do revolutionary, disruptive breakthroughs or substantially incremental innovation. Highly innovative organizations depend more heavily on talented people, information power, technological expertise and market capacity to develop and commercialize innovation for building a real time innovative society.

An innovator can shape great vision, generate fresh ideas, and unique insight all the time. The art of innovation is to generate novel solutions, having the transcendence from darkness to brightness. The science of innovation is to manage innovation development or emotional cycles, and execute in a systematic manner that provides sustained competitive advantage. It’s important to apply an interdisciplinary approach to shape great ideas and manage innovation successfully. Collectively, innovation makes the world a better place full of creative energy.

Illuminateforethoughtfulness

We cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in the present or in the past. 
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?




                                   Illuminate Forethoughtfulness


Illuminateforethoughtfulness Nowadays, with the increasing pace of changes, unprecedented uncertainty and complexity, driving business forward is extremely difficult. The wrong direction will no doubt lead to the wrong destination. Leading organizations can look into the future clearly, proactively planning, evolving, and co-creating in the dynamic digital ecosystem.

InitiateForesightfulThis digital world today differs from anything ever experienced in our history; the interconnectedness of all on a planetary scale. Today we are inextricably linked, in real time and in ways far more imminent than most realize. It is really difficult to become aware of things you are not aware of. Particularly shifts in current norms, which is governed by complexity. Is it possible to “predict” the future, how to apply systems thinking the approach to forecasting, and how to shape such a “foresight” mind?

InitiatenavigationInitiateinformationbasedinsight Compared to changes, the transformation is more radical, with all sorts of ups and downs, bumps and curves. It brings opportunities for business growth, also chaos, frictions as pitfalls. It takes a holistic approach to connect all important dots with multifaceted perspectives; try to develop, improve, or change everything in prioritized order continuously, and manage business continuums as long as it creates a more long-term business advantage and solves critical business challenges. There are different aspects of business changes at different rates, organizations today need to keep building their unique competency and manage digital transformation seamlessly.

Unfoldfutureviaforecastlogic Rapid change and frequent disruptions are the new normal; uncertainties are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress, be it social, professional, or personal life. We cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in the present or in the past. Forethoughtful business leaders and professionals develop and demonstrate strong forecast logic via information based insight and interdisciplinary knowledge, envision the trends and forecast the upcoming change with a certain degree of precision.

Unfolding Future via Forecasting We live in a complex business environment with a high degree of unpredictability and ambiguity, the highly complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. The business leaders today need to see further than what all others see; seek input for future adjustments, and orchestrate dynamic competencies via managerial activities, and ensure the company capabilities fully support the strategy as well as improve the overall business agility and maturity.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with about #10800th 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.

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Innovativeformalization

Innovation is what leads to differentiation. Innovation today has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context.

Innovation is a unique business capability to reinvent business, creativity is the most desired professional quality. Disciplined business innovation is about taking structured approaches and scientific methodologies to maximize business value delivery. 


So innovation management will have to capture the emerging trends, catch up to the business needs with digital speed. The essence of innovation is made of trying new combinations of known things, blending different things to create something novel. It's the essence of human society's evolution.

If needed, repurpose, realign and reconfigure well-designed components to catalyze innovation: The purpose itself is multidimensional, to keep the business firm, think of the quality of organizations. In face of fierce competitions or technological/marketing disruptions, purpose can be revised or expanded to fit for the emerging events or drive desired changes. To continually fit for the purpose, organizations should make proper adjustments to the changing environment, and unlock business potential fluently.

Many companies get stuck at the lower level of the organizational maturity with the symptoms such as redundant processes, dysfunctional management, inflexible structure, misaligned resources, change inertia, etc. To make the business more purpose driven or upgrade the business with repurpose, realign and reconfigure well-designed components to develop innovation capabilities for enabling organizations to fulfill their strategy ultimately.


Reflection has not gone away but has undergone refinement and formalization: We are all new combinations of the known, with the brainpower to discover unknowns. The process of reflection is the foundation of learning, growth, improvement, and innovation. Stepping out of the routine transactional activities for a while, and reimagining the new possibility. Reflection provides clarity, deep understanding, giving you directional opportunities for personal growth, and helping to develop creativity, individually or collectively.

Organizations that ignore incubation time and reflection often fail when attempting innovation. It is highly important that people reflect in a constructive manner how anything could be done in a different way. It requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat to get clear and focused on the innovative idea, business model, process or solution, and to then enact, embody and execute in a disciplined way.

Reputation and brand protection become increasingly intertwined and crucial: Innovation is risky, every staff has responsibility for their own reputation and corporate reputation; but sometimes reputation goes beyond their control. The management needs to clarify what the brand stands for, what their reputation looks like, how the company wants its stakeholders to see and perceive the brand name and the connotation it wants its stakeholders to associate to- innovator or a stabilizer, a niche player or a standardizer, etc. Business management should take seriously about their reputation, have intention to build a strong brand,

Innovation shouldn’t be serendipity. It is about figuring out the best ways to do things. Organizations take seriously about doing things differently, providing customized solutions. They need to take calculated risks, pay more attention to their reputation, develop a consistent brand name for engaging employees and delight customers.

Innovation is what leads to differentiation. Innovation today has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context. There are many ways to differentiate and, therefore, there are many ways to do innovation. A good innovation shouldn’t be just the serendipity; and a bad innovation needs to become a learning lesson. Innovation is a unique business competency to generate value constantly.

Illuminatenormality

The digital normality-volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity bring challenges in business management.
Consider an organization as a coherent, and hyper-connected ecosystem. In a world where change is significantly speeding up, business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy, and the strategy can no longer stay static, the business goals can no longer be well framed in advance.

 Many things outside of the box yesterday have become the new normal today, within this context; the organization must stay evolving in a compatible manner with digital normality. So business leaders today need to keep navigating the unknown, build up the team which includes the complementary mindset, diversified background, and differentiated capabilities to co-solve complex problems smoothly.

In order to deal with a new normal of uncertainty, hyper-diversity, understand the dynamics, influence desired changes, envision alternative scenarios: With today's "VUCA" digital new normal, organizations have blurred territories, overwhelming growth of information, business management has a very wide scope and a relatively new area of expertise. never assume you know what the problem is. Never think there is a short list of solutions you can pick from. Agile organizations should be complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.

The key is to enlist the dissenters to provide input during the process to maintain engagement. Business outliers have an open mind that holds onto its beliefs while being prepared to consider other perspectives should they make sense. It’s crucial to encourage creative and independent thinking, gain fresh knowledge, and take diverse perspectives to understand emerging issues, in order to come up with alternative solutions.

In many circumstances, business management itself has to be changed for fitting the digital new normal: Organizations are made by people and people are the key element in self-adaptive organisms of today's organization. As a matter of fact, uncertainties are a common occurrence in any walk of our progress. It's so easy to focus on the bad; see faults and mistakes, instead of seeing the positives, recognizing good and bringing those to light.

Well planned Change Management with comprehensible understanding greatly reduces complexity, practically eliminating the fear of change that derails good or even great intentions, so it should have a better opportunity to achieve expectations. Today’s digital leaders have to know the psychology behind changes, balance the optimistic spirit and cautious attitude; openness and standardization; discipline and flexibility to expedite business transformation.

Industries and businesses are leveraging the two speeds-industrial and digital speed in navigating through “VUCA” new normal
: The change will be the new normality, we cannot predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in the current or in the past. Organizational leaders and professionals must act with speed. They need stability, agility, confidence, and self-awareness. They should demonstrate emotional stability and technical competency, become aware of knowledge as great assets and resources, to achieve strategic goals effectively.

In face of “VUCA’ normality, all businesses have to accept change to survive, and build innovation competency to thrive. A hybrid nature of organization mixes the virtual platform with the physical functional structure to enforce cross-functional collaboration and hybrid innovation. Timing is, therefore, critica; because when you miss the right timing, you miss the opportunity; and if you don’t move fast enough, you already lag behind.

The digital normality-volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity bring challenges in business management. Business leaders should realize that the breakthrough success in business requires not only forward-thinking strategies but also a transformation of the company's underlying functions and structures, in order to build the new sets of business capabilities to adapt to the "VUCA" digital normality.

Initiatives

Business  goals can no longer be well framed in advance, business initiative implementation is an iterative continuum.
In face of frequent disruptions, exponential growth of information, organizations across vertical industries need to constantly “push themselves” out of their comfort zone to improve business agility, keep reinventing themselves, and adapt to changing environments promptly.

To make smooth implementation, the strategic planning needs to get to the level of specifically achievable goals, enhance an iterative planning-implementation continuum.

In today's digital dynamic or unstable business circumstances, there's nothing to be done about an uncontrollable situation, accept vulnerability, but do your best to manage uncertainty.

 Initiatives


Initiatives v Business is complex, understanding the dynamics, working to influence the multifaceted business management takes understanding and energy to deal with uncertainty, handle difficult situations, overcome challenges. It’s important to identify what generates the most value for the company and helps managers keep their eyes on what matters.

Initiatives iv In the business world where change is significantly speeding up, information is only a click away, that business leaders couldn’t predict the future with a certain degree of accuracy. The business planning can no longer stay static, the business goals can no longer be well framed in advance, business initiative implementation is an iterative continuum.

Initiatives iii Contemporary society is a dynamic continuum with innovation themes and collective human progress. The innovation paradigm arises out of new knowledge and the emerging trends to capture the great opportunities and identify risks. It is important to apply an interdisciplinary lens to understand how different business factors affect the business ecosystem, and then, manage people to make continuous innovation. With effective leadership and information based synchronization and orchestration, organizations are able to unlock performance smoothly.

Initiatives ii Today’s business is hyper-complex and interdependent, business managers need to have an unconventional understanding of the business elements underlying the surface. Incremental change takes a top-down structural approach. The transformation has to go a step further and involves the internalization of the new values and conceptual model, enforcing information based confluence and leading the large scale of changes systematically.

Initiatives i There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place in today’s complex marketing environment. Most companies would never take a big leap even with the enticement of a huge payback due to the minimum risk culture which delivers minimal payback. Business management needs to ensure they have enough resources and fluent skills to implement strategic goals; ensuring risks and assumptions are understood and manageable; the business is synchronized with the flow of quality information, and people are empowered to coordinate and execute, to achieve high performance results coherently.

Quality is about doing the right things right the first time. High-quality enterprise consists of high-quality people, products, or services; business capabilities and processes, etc. To effectively lead the organization to reach the next level of business maturity, it’s important to shape quality as the mindset and quality as the management discipline.

Initiativesofreinvention

Reinventing business is about developing differentiated abilities to weave a variety of components and multi threads of management into a vibrant and coherent whole.

C
ompared to the considerably static industrial age, the information abundant digital era means the increasing speed of changes, the “always on,” and hyper-connected, interdependent business reality. 

More often than not, business situations have become more subtle, multi-layered and, therefore, more complex, what's needed every now and then to any individual, team, organization, society, and on up to the entire planet's population, is abundant energy to re-focus, kick-start, or create paradigm shift. It is important to understand the breadth and depth of complex issues, identify trade-offs, learn to seek divergent views before developing a convergent conclusion, and take an interdisciplinary approach to business transformation.


Understanding and examining the whole, breaking down the silo, flattening organizational hierarchical layers, and improving the overall organization’s competency: Overly rigid organizational hierarchy with silo setting perpetuates bureaucracy and causes stagnation. The organization gets stagnated because the business systems are no longer able to accommodate changing needs; it’s too fragile to run at a solid speed. Silo mentality causes business ineffectiveness, creates the gaps and often leads to unhealthy internal competitions for the limited resources, and decelerates the speed of changes.

Building the business competency intends to improve the whole rather than the part of the organization by encouraging holistic thinking and taking an integral approach. The solution to break down silos is to apply structural thinking, implement an effective cross-silo strategy, with better integral processes, and collaborative communication. So the workplace can balance the fluidity, freedom, and responsibilities of the functions, and the eco-business environment, to enable information fluidity, workforce creativity, and management holism.

If you pick the right thing to alter, you can sometimes achieve enormous outcomes at little or no expenditure of effort on your part: Organizations or human societies are complex. There are always different complexities at a different time or dimension. One characteristic of nonlinearity is that small changes can have large impacts. Perhaps, the management thinks they can lay out a high-level "big picture" blueprint without addressing the small things. But in reality, sometimes, a small error, or inconsistency in a system specification can decelerate business performance significantly. Similarly, achieving a bigger impact can sometimes be the result of a very small initiative. This is the magic of non-linearity and it requires great insights and cross-disciplinary knowledge.

There needs to be a better appreciation to examine a situation and understand the problem from different angles. There are multilateral management approaches to run an information-intensive, interdependent global organization. In any case, to seek disruptive opportunities requires businesses’ transformational capability with agility to develop differentiated competencies. How successful the organization can manage “disruptive ideas” and produce innovative results depends on how those ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with. Discover the right leverage to make a bigger impact.

Build up trust by pulling people together, bonding people around clear and benevolent intentions, to achieve desired changes and sustain their impact: The most effective digital workplace is in which sharing and collaboration are the norms, understanding, and recognizing that everyone plays a “piece of the puzzle.” It’s important to break down old school thoughts, harness cross-functional communication, collaboration, transparency, respect, for striking the right balance of the old way and innovation. In fact, the greater the efficiency of an organization, the greater the need is for creativity to maintain high performance in the long run.

Give people the voices, tools and experiences of how to effectively communicate across the world even if they perhaps speak different professional languages, break down the subjective perceptions and realities of the issues, build empathy across diverse cultures, take a further step and involve internalization of the digital conceptual model to improve business capacity. It demands fresh insight, interdisciplinary practices, patience, persistence, and courage, among other things, to shape a high-performance workforce and a resilient organization.

The breadth and depth of business management improvement include people and process related activities, involving tuning business workflow, organizational structure, information technologies, etc. Reinventing business is about developing differentiated abilities to weave a variety of components and multi threads of management into a vibrant and coherent whole. It’s also critical to keep monitoring the overall health of the organization, for achieving business management excellence.


Illuminatefind

As we are-all global citizens, find a path to- fit our footprints, climb up the world, to make the difference…

Nature is diverse, versatile,

find commonality in-

the world of difference;

find a unified means of-

looking at the essence.


When we pause to -

take a breath,

we have-

an opportunity to-

consolidate, assimilate,

differentiate,

are we able to-

find our own space,

in which we can-

reimagine, refresh -

creative energy;

find peace in harmony?


There are -

lonely moments on-

the journey being -

called life,

are we persistent to-

find meaning,

find purpose,

find truth,

find courage,

find each other;

find strength, weakness…

As we are-

all global citizens,

find a path to-

fit our footprints,

climb up the world,

to make the difference…



For those who -

are trying to -

solve tough problems,

find common ground,

find root causes,

find ways to-

leverage sentiment,

initiate open dialogues,

channels up, down,

across the boundary.

find novel solutions.

find ways to-

make progress.




Monday, May 1, 2023

Initiatives

Align the business initiatives that have a three-way impact - revenue, cost and investments, for building differentiated business competency.
Business is complex, understanding the dynamics, working to influence the multifaceted business management takes understanding and energy to deal with uncertainty, handle difficult situations, overcome challenges. It’s important to identify what generates the most value for the company and helps managers keep their eyes on what matters. 

The more stakeholders can impact business initiatives seriously, the better chance the initiatives will achieve or exceed the business expectations. All should be synchronized without compromising.

For initiatives that go forward from building process maps on paper to setting up a run-time environment, build instruments to orchestrate solutions:
To actually facilitate change or movement in a company, you need a business steering instrument that gives you a holistic view so that the business problem can be seen from every relevant perspective. Do in-depth analysis of how the "initiative" impacts people and strategy in the organization from a long term perspective and orchestrate change smoothly.

Quality should in particular focus on the result of the initiative management. It's important to gain top executives’ sponsorship, collect stakeholders’ requirements, take business initiatives that can explore emerging opportunities, design new business models, investigate different paths for accelerating business growth. In practice, align business resources, talent, information technology, and processes to fix clearly defined problems, prevent risks effectively, and improve business management effectiveness.

For initiatives to be successful and build differentiated organizational competency, people are still the weakest link, how to invest in staff is always a long term goal: Organizational management in the industrial age usually applies silo thinking and linear logic to business initiatives management. To make a strategic impact, they need to accelerate their thinking, broaden vision, define the scope, specification of business initiatives, harness cross-functional collaboration. People are often the most invaluable human capital, but the weakest link in business initiative management. Strong business initiatives stimulate change, spark creativity, and improve people-centricity.

The emotional climate of an organization has an impact on how people feel and on how they perform. People in an organization want to feel encouraged that there are others who support them in accomplishing their task resourcefully. Their organizations really encourage employees to step up and propose bold transformational change initiatives and then ask management to follow through. Openness, transparency, collaboration, empowerment, respect for the value of people and adding value to the enterprises are the essence of great business management.

For initiatives to improve customer satisfaction, it’s important to gain empathetic understanding, meet their needs and solve their problems smoothly: One of the fundamental goals to run a business is to create customers. Loyal customers are required to help achieve business objectives, such as increasing revenue by growing the customer base, and increasing purchasing amount per customer. Without customers, an organization cannot survive; an organization needs to deepen understanding of its customer needs and requirements. A customer-centric company should show business agility in providing what the customer is looking for in customized products and services. If done well, this leads to customer success..

In order to produce personalized solutions, the management needs to collect feedback from customers: How are customers going to use your solution? Does the new solution help them do things better than the current solution? Take proactive approaches to help customers gain value from the products or services you provide. Customer-centric initiatives can truly create the momentum for catalyzing business growth and bringing high-performance business results.

Great business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving crucial problems. Business initiatives at the strategic level are not isolated, but require a holistic management approach to produce high performance outcomes. The business management needs to do impact analysis, set key performance indicators, and align the business initiatives that have a three-way impact - revenue, cost and investments, for building differentiated business competency.

Influenceofprofessionalism

Being a professional starts with a professional mindset, builds professional capabilities, gets the work done resourcefully and achieves high-performance results

R
unning an organization is complex, it is difficult to have a highly competitive organization without high-caliber professionals and competitive talent. It doesn’t mean if you had a profession, you would be a well-respected professional with high professionalism. 

What are the root causes of professionals' lack of true professionalism? Do they lack independent thinking or critical reasoning? Professionalism is an important quality for today’s multigenerational, multicultural, and multi-devising workforce, and it takes time and energy to build it up. So it’s important to keep shaping advanced mindsets, sharpening relevant skill sets, and reaching to the next level of professionalism.

Being professional means you present a certain quality that shows a high level of value & excellence: Many people do wrong things, not because of ignorance, but because of poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge or insight, unconscious bias, or preconceived notions. Business professionals should bring value to their work, community, and societies, their organizations need to value them with mutual trust relationships, discover their hidden value, invest wisely, refine their talent, and focus on value-driven management practices.

The command and control management worked in an industrial age often limited people’s potential to unleash their potential. It’s important to explore how value is created & delivered. Valuing someone implies respecting them, encouraging them to be who they are, understanding them via empathy, and aligning their value with the organization’s value propositions. Professionals with a growth mindset can think independently with professional capabilities to make sound judgments, generate multifaceted values, and solve problems professionally.

Professionals have a winning mixture of professional traits and competencies: Professionalism is composed of competence, confidence, working ethics, self-esteem, humility, creativity, learning agility, and emotional excellence, global empathy. It usually takes time to sharpen professional skill-sets, and build differentiated competency. Therefore, the learning-agile mindset, enriched knowledge and years of experience count, strong discipline and constant practices count; the great attitude to learn from your frustration and failures count.

People need to keep exploring their talent, broadening their relevant skills and deepening their expertise to solve more complex problems and get higher-than-expected results. Professional development takes an iterative learning-doing-improving cycle that expands into the new horizon extensively; so people need to keep their minds open and their energy high, to continue unleashing their potential and move up toward the upper level of professional competency with core focus and fluency.

Professionalism is a foundation to bring wisdom to the workplace:
Different employees have different expectations for the work they do and the workplace they go to. The right people with high professionalism have a positive influence on corporate culture and bring wisdom to the workplace. But people lacking professionalism bring a negative attitude, unhealthy competition, change inertia, and generate more problems rather than solving them.

A professional workforce means a positive atmosphere, growth mindsets, intellectual stimulation, the culture of learning, open-minded leadership, and collaborative & professional working relationships. Filter out the negative vibe and keep professionalism shining, to improve organizational effectiveness. People need to keep exploring their talent, broadening their perspectives, and deepening their interdisciplinary expertise, building, integrating, and reconfiguring their professional competencies.

The more complex our world becomes, the more complex skill sets, and differentiated competencies we need to practice varying professional works. Being a professional is inherently and inextricably interwoven with high levels of “professionalism”; being a professional starts with a professional mindset, and builds professional capabilities, to get the work done resourcefully and achieve high-performance results. Being an independent thinker, an insightful feedback giver, an effective decision-maker, a high-performance doer, a resourceful problem-solver, a humble learner, a trustful colleague, a courageous innovator, a risk preventer, etc.

Initiativesoffinding

Organizations should update their management philosophy from controlling to autonomous; from “built to last,” to “built to change.”
Information mundane, complexity, uncertainty, disruptive changes, and interdependence are the new normal facing business today. Organizational leaders and professionals should realize that breakthrough business success requires not only forward-thinking planning, but also fine-tunes underlying functions and processes, soft business factors, to build the differentiated sets of business capabilities, for improving organizational agility, innovation, and maturity.



Finding an answer to increase business competency takes quality information, collective insight and collaborative innovation effort: Knowledge is power, information is one of the most important business assets. The critical information which we so often miss, though, is in the gaps of professional development and business management. Nowadays, perhaps, we cannot find any professional who does not have the knowledge or uses information to work. Certainly, as work is different, he or she needs different knowledge and expertise. In the organizational environment, it’s important to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of the business, products, and resources; and then, refine information to capture business insight for exploring growth opportunities and preventing risks effectively.

Information is not static, it could be outdated sooner than what you thought of. Information could be personal, based on an individual's interest and perception. You will have your own collected data, information that you trust and understand; you also learn what to ignore. It’s important to develop an effective set of filters that help you find fresh information which interests you. Information-savvy people are both problem finders and problem solvers. So always challenge your own thinking by asking questions which often lead to discovering situations others cannot see at first. That will give you the confidence to make decisions; help you stand your ground when others have less well-considered ideas. Always be flexible to understand the other's point of view. It takes quality information, collective insight and collaborative innovation effort to build business competency.

Finding the leverage points, guide, direct, own the strategy people hold themselves accountable for, finding the point of failure to avoid it in the future
: For many business leaders, there is no surprise that they will see the mixed picture of “old and new,” from the mindset, business model, process or management practice perspectives. The challenge for business management is to reinvent business by looking forward, looking underneath, and being proactively looking for opportunities to improve constantly.

If anything is wrong, businesses should take the time to analyze the process to find the point of failure to avoid it in the future. Listen, communicate, and rally the team for the cause to accelerate change; connect the dots across the various management disciplines, and glue up all crucial ingredients to manage performance as an iterative continuum.

Organizations that have taken the steps to mature management practices find the soft success factors making significant impact on the business success:
So many companies and "managers" focus on the tangible, but they lack an in-depth understanding of the intangible business success factors such as communication, culture, leadership, as well as how to manage them effectively. In the business across vertical sectors, especially those strictly hierarchical large organizations with bureaucratic culture, there are over-rigid hierarchy, functional/process silos which cause communication bottlenecks or dysfunctional management.

It is important that business management has objectivity and humility to realize that their weak point, they need to keep modernizing, integrating, innovating, and optimizing. The real impact of making the invisible visible, and then measurable, comes when companies find ways to leverage business sentiment to initiate business transformation dialogues, open communication across the enterprise to orchestrate change, empower people and enforce across-functional collaboration to unleash the collective potential. It’s important to integrate soft business success factors into hard business capabilities and build differentiated business competency.

With faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, to improve its maturity, high-performing organizations should be complex, but flexible social-eco systems that start to appreciate business attributes such as open communication, ownership, creativity, integration, customized structuring, and multifaceted partnerships. Organizations should update their management philosophy from controlling to autonomous; from “built to last,” to “built to change.”


Initiateanalysis

In differentiation, competitive advantage is probably more to do with information fluency, brand name refinement, and quality.

T
he 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?


 

   Initiate Analysis 


Initiateanalysis The environment which the company is in changes over time, new competitors in the market keep evolving. In differentiation, competitive advantage is probably more to do with information fluency, brand name refinement, and quality.

Initiativesofanalytics Nowadays, business is complex, change is inevitable, information is one of the most critical business assets besides people. When doing analysis to discover truth and debunk the myth, you're on a fact-finding mission, asking yourself whether you are truly open to new ideas; or if you are only pursuing those that support your current understanding of the facts.

Initiateinformationbasedinsight The world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile. A high-performance organization is a system that is able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of leading business changes. To survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment, businesses need to build differentiated capacity that shows a path to meet business objectives while adapting as needed because ultimately, the best route is always changing. The business speed can only be accelerated with a clear vision, strong focus, and distinctive capabilities.

Initiativesofanalysis Nowadays, the business environment is dynamic, forward-thinking companies leverage information-based analytics to provide business foresight and customer insight about upcoming opportunities or risks. In the information based society, what used to be called intelligent organization are designed to transform unevaluated information into information whose accuracy and authenticity are verified to generate business foresight or customer insight for increasing business values constantly.

Initiativesofprescriptiveanalysis Information is one of the most invaluable assets of the organization. It is reaching an inflection point for organizations to unleash their business potential via advanced analytics. Analytics in real-time coupled with a powerful rules engine poses a challenge to the market with the goal being people-centricity. If predictive analysis intends to tell you what could happen in the future, then prescriptive analysis show you better choices for handling problems effectively But it still takes time for getting technology maturity, methodology/process maturity and talent maturity;

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with about #10800th 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.

Illuminatelongvoyage

Can you discover- your own landscape, enjoy unique scenes of -paradigm shift; avoid roadblocks, adapt to- ups & downs, make tough voyage, impressively?

C
onstant change,

frequent disruptions are -

part of reality;

we have no choice,

but ride-

change waves, boldly,

catch rising tides,

determinately;

voyage into -

“VUCA” dynamic,

courageously.


The digital sea is-

full of information, imagination,

sometimes, calm, inclusive;

other times, turmoil, dynamic;

the old world is-

the past,

the New World is-

the future;

change is -

the voyage;

the art of -

sailing depends on-

knowing how to -

manage the wind,

capture the waves;

avoid hidden pitfalls,

steer your vehicle in -

the right direction with-

premium speed.


Transformational change is -

the long voyage;

it takes -

vision, passion,

motivation, discipline,

courage, persistence to-

get out of -

comfort zones,

old patterns,

move forward,

dive deeper,

inspire self-exploration,

self-renewal in-

intellectual, emotional,

spiritual dimensions

adventurously;

can you discover-

your own landscape,

enjoy unique scenes of -

paradigm shift;

avoid roadblocks,

adapt to-

ups & downs,

make tough voyage,

impressively?