Innovativeinfluence

Isn't a tough journey to- celebrate #10,900 blog postings - to pursue- the digital way of brainstorming, innovating, motivating, story-telling?

As we live in a world where change is the norm, there is no other choice but to keep learning agile, broadening and deepening our understanding of the world constantly. Professional fitness is based on both how we think and what we are doing. We define most societies by shared patterns of beliefs, attitudes, and actions. 

It’s the time to celebrate # 10900 blog-posting. The blog is a dynamic book flowing with thoughts fluently; sharing fresh insight; conveying clear vision, and making progressive influence indefatigably.

Reinforcing an innovative paradigm shift smoothly: In face of “VUCA” reality, influence is the cognitive ability to understand; communication skill to inspire and persuade. You cannot make a true innovation paradigm shift without breaking some old rules, and reinforce innovation principles and practices. The fit mindset is about how to think forward, strategically, creatively, positively, and systematically. It is important to make the necessary reinforcement for steering ourselves, the organizations, or our societies in the right direction and stepping into the deep new normal steadfastly.

Organizational leaders and professionals should learn how to perceive issues through multidimensional angles such as the lenses of information technology, sociology, psychology, the economics of education, the anthropology of cultures, economics, philosophy, ecology, etc. They are able to make influences via envisioning, bridging, encouraging others toward their vision by communicating empathetically. Reinforce “lessons learned” and keep the organization in the innovative mode successfully.

Reinvent the future holistically: Organizations today are a huge melting pot of people with the very characteristics of hyper-diversity and interdependence. Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting varying characteristics in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. How to unleash the abundance of human potential is perhaps one of the best rewarding arenas for reinventing the world thoughtfully. Making positive influence, advancing interdisciplinary management processes and practices become an integral effort of organizational or societal reinvention.

Reinventing the future to get digital ready is an evolutionary journey with ups and downs, promises and perils on the way. That requires passion, courage, much more time, energy, experimentation, retreat, and reflection, creating the synergy to strive in “VUCA” reality. Forward-looking view is more about thinking ahead, to determine what the future needs to look like, what the transformation must look like, how to overcome the roadblocks, and close the blind spots. It is essential for the entire organization to be pulling in the right direction by allocating resources, time, and assets scientifically; enforcing a “realigning-refining-refocusing - restructuring - redirecting - rebalancing” cycle iteratively.

Reimagine possibilities boldly: When looking at global society with innovative themes and creative people around the world, it’s critical to be inclusive, influential, with intellectual curiosity to reimagine possibilities and orchestrate innovation world-widely. The progress of the world needs to be pulled together and pushed forward by innovators across the globe, who can apply advanced thinking to understand the world deeply, keep learning agile, and take innovative approaches to solve problems facing global society collaboratively.

High influencers demonstrate the bold vision of what could be happening in the environment, how to create desired changes; and then have the unique competency to lead innovation breakthroughs, recognize innovators or change agents, and mobilize the necessary resources in the right way to move the organization towards a preferred alternative state. Innovators can bring fresh perspectives and think differently; break down conventional wisdom, reimagine possibilities, grasp emerging opportunities, and take an alternative way to do things, make radical change with accelerated speed.

The conditions of the economy, the state of the world, technology, and social trends all impact the overall mindsets, behaviors of all generations and shape the future of the global society. First and foremost, to be "authentic"; be comfortable to be different, dare to ask tough questions, and challenge conventional settings. Keep mindset fit with updated knowledge, skills, capabilities, and behaviors, ensure that your thoughts and voices are in synchronization by combined actions, endurance, and with the right spirit to make influence cohesively.

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Innovation

An innovator can make a significant influence to make the world forward.

Innovativeness is absolutely a mindset-to think differently and do things in alternative ways. Innovation is about moving forward. In any organization, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. 

Forward-looking people or companies keep innovating to advance human society. Otherwise the world will come to a standstill.

Innovation & righteous: Innovation is perhaps like the brightest lamp to come on, with positive thinking, cognitive outlook, interdisciplinary understanding. The righteous people with the right mindset can identify the right problems to solve, and solve them innovatively at the right timing. So they become more learning-agile, discerning, innovative, influential, being able to move up toward the next level of professionalism.

The great attitude towards innovation is about taking calculated risks to inspire good innovation initiatives for capturing growth opportunities, Truth is in being righteous. There is no “one size fits all” formula to pursue innovation. Each organization just has to "walk the talk," avoid hidden traps and explore their own way to keep innovating. The right set of rules is not for limiting your imagination, but for framing the conditions to identify opportunities, manage risks and build differentiated innovation competency to tap potential, and make collective progress.

Innovation & argumentative: We become argumentative when the beliefs we hold as our foundation are challenged. We should be open to new information or a different view, and develop good tools for the evaluation of these kinds of arguments to spark fresh thoughts and diverse viewpoints. Having good arguments that challenge your beliefs or common senses lead to learning, creativity, empathy, and profundity.

An argument opens a new perspective; changing perspective will change your mind. It's all about letting go of the "looking good" syndrome we all have so deeply embedded in us. People don’t need to agree with the other side's viewpoints completely; but they can always gain empathy, insight, and new perspectives to see things from the other angle. So constructive arguments can lead to an open mind for desiring fresh knowledge, that should be the positive driver for learning something from it and spark innovation.

Innovation & fertile: Innovation is about generating ideas and realizing their values. One of the drivers of innovation is cross-fertilization and pollination of ideas. Most organizations are not fertile ground for ideation, They fear taking risks and seldom learn from their mistakes. They lack a culture of risk tolerance. The hyper-connecting nature of organizations or societies need to offer particularly fertile ground for developing cross-industry ecosystems in which business can grow and innovate smoothly.

Creativity is a sort of intelligence, often happening at the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness. The subconscious mind can be thought of as the secret garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow freely, creative energy flows smoothly. To continuously innovate within organizations, individuals and groups need to connect and communicate openly, cross-pollinate fresh ideas, develop a creative workplace, and build innovation competency.

Creativity is one of the most desired professional competencies nowadays. An innovator can make a significant influence to make the world forward. The importance of innovation has increased as the business has the pressure to get better outcomes. Innovation = Idea executed to produce unique value. And high-innovative organizations can fine-tune innovation management as a differentiated business capability to create differentiated business values in a structural way.

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Illuminateability

An organization would need to ask whether they need the capability at the base level to sustain the business, or at differentiating level to be the key differentiator for the business.

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.

Illuminate Ability

Illuminateability Organization is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving, bringing greater awareness of intricacies and the values. A business capability is the ability of an organization to do things effectively for achieving desired outcomes and measurable benefit, fulfilling business purpose.

Innateability Organizational capability is the means to an end for achieving certain business performance. An organization would need to ask whether they need the capability at the base level to sustain the business, or at differentiating level to be the key differentiator for the business.

Initiatives The business and human world become more complex and diverse, it’s always critical to gain sufficient knowledge and unique insight to perceive holistically, observe deeper and see around the corner, have an in-depth understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario, take initiatives to improve organizational productivity, agility, innovation, flexibility, and resilience.

Innateabilities Change is part of a new normal, a coherent company has a deliberately close alignment among the organization’s strategic direction, its most distinctive abilities to understand, plan and act. The business growth cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of clarifying a vision reflecting the “mind and soul” of the company to accelerate business execution via continuous balance cycles of participation, expansion, innovation, and optimization.

Illuminateability In today’s hyper-competitive environment, knowledge gets stale sooner than what you thought about due to rapid change and exponential growth of information. Top seasoned leaders or high professionals become aware when some of the long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations, they need to keep learning and build unique core competencies.

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.

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Illuminateunlearn

Unlearning what -you have learned is- part and parcel of -fixing what is broken; should you enhance the full cycle of -learning, unlearning, relearning constantly?

Our global world is -

abundant, dynamic, diversified,

full of mysteries;

the things we know,

compared to -

what we don’t know,

are just the tip of -

the iceberg;

can you keep-

learning agile,

unlearn outdated concepts,

old traditions;

regional common sense;

refresh creative energy, progressively?

Global professionals become aware when-

some of -

long-acquired knowledge is-

no longer applicable,

in certain situations;

worldwide stages;

can they keep growth,

in mind,

learn from -

different experiences,

but also learn to -

unlearn their experiences,

present potential to -

break down -

conventional thoughts,

spark creativity,

at all times, influentially?

Silo mindset is -

perhaps more rigid,

the “know it all” attitude stop you from -

learning new knowledge,

making change, proactively;

unlearning what -

you have learned is-

part and parcel of -

fixing what is broken;

should you

enhance the full cycle of -

learning, unlearning,

relearning constantly;

fight against -

limited conditioning to-

reshape an advanced world,

forethoughtfully?

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Illuminateability

Identify and close business capability gaps, fine tune underlying organizational structures, processes, and increase capability coherence.

Organization is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving, bringing greater awareness of intricacies and the values. A business capability is the ability of an organization to do things effectively for achieving desired outcomes and measurable benefit, fulfilling business purpose. 

Businesses across industrial sectors embark on the “digital era” of computing and managing by taking logical but iterative steps in developing their set of capabilities to get work done and generate multifaceted business value consistently.

It is critical to build dynamic capabilities for accelerating business changes: Identify what capabilities give your products/services a competitive advantage and align to the enterprise vision and planning. 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, identify opportunities and threats accordingly, enable capability-based business growth and development.

The dynamic capabilities can be built via sensing changes within the business ecosystem. Most of the enterprise capabilities need to be woven cross-functionally, with all critical building blocks. It takes empathetic communications and collaborations to bridge functional silos and fine-tune key business processes; aligns important business elements, different parts of the business to adopt more points of integration in building dynamic capabilities with a much shorter development cycle.

Incorporates modular, layered, and loosely coupled modular capabilities to build differentiated business capability: Change and disruption are part of reality, business capabilities are strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc. There are a couple of important ingredients for configuring or reconfiguring business capability such as people, process, knowledge, technology, etc. It’s also important to fine-tune soft business elements such as communication and culture for dealing with business frictions, and ensure capability design must fit to produce quality business results holistically.

There are necessary capabilities for businesses to keep the lights on; and there are a set of differentiated capabilities to build business advantage. It needs to break down outdated processes, incorporates modular, layered, and loosely coupled modular capabilities to build differentiated business capability. So people should keep learning, relearning all the time. The important business processes need to be reviewed regularly, refined regularly, and are transparent across the business for improving organizational maturity.

It’s important to have an in-depth understanding of what capabilities are important to develop core competency: The business management should make an assessment, develop both necessary and unique capabilities, and figure out how to develop core competency. Improve capabilities based on your enterprise strengths; investing in the best of breed capabilities and integrating them into cohesive business competency.

Business capability is core because it can build long term business advantages. Organizations have to proactively craft a set of capabilities and build the core business competency. It is all about understanding and examining the whole, analyzing capability gaps in the context of future need, capability dependency, investment calculation, etc, with the goal to solve critical problems, accelerate performance, and drive transformative changes seamlessly.

An organization would need to ask whether they need the capability at the base level to sustain the business today, or competitive level to stay competitive in the future. In order to run a thriving business, business management needs to make an objective assessment, identify and close business capability gaps, fine tune underlying organizational structures, processes, and increase capability coherence, to reach clarified business vision and achieve strategic business goals.

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Initiatives

The path of going digital can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive, fitting your business strength.

Every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns; with unprecedented levels of uncertainty around a volatile marketing situation, fierce competition, disruptive technologies, hidden risks. 

There are so many variables to consider for business management to identify blind spots, capability gaps, information bottlenecks. It is a cohesive entity of policies, programs, initiatives that concentrate and fuse corporate resources to enable an organization to establish, sustain, and enhance its competitiveness. Organizational maturity is not just about technical excellence or process efficiency, but more about generating multifaceted values with desired attributes such as effectiveness, agility, innovation, intelligence, and people-centricity.

Initiate an innovation cycle of "creating ideas - Experimenting - Verifying - Implementing - Measuring": Innovation is not lip service, but a structural process that needs to be managed effectively. The challenge is in knowing how to place some sort of value on innovation and that is hard to do in advance. It helps to assure that the results of an innovative approach will have a positive impact on customers, partners, end users, and the marketplace. Define circles, roles, and authority through the members of your organization to catalyze innovation. Review the pros and cons, potential cause and effect of major concerns, short and long-term financial implications and the overall impact on the company in order to manage innovation in a structural way.

It’s important to develop the process of a corporate pulse that identifies where the opportunities, passion, motivation, and commitment of the organization lies for innovation, and who embodies it. Initiate a healthy cycle of "creating ideas - Experimenting - Verifying - Implementing - Measuring” innovation management. Businesses just have to learn from experimenting, amplify the best practices, cultivate an innovative climate, and improve the innovation management success rate.

Initiate “looking, listening, questioning, understanding, planning, testing and collaborating” change continuum: Change is the journey, not just a destination. Managing change as an iterative continuum means that it is not sufficient to just change people’s attitude or control their behaviors manually. Because you can’t manipulate how they think. Initiating and managing a logical change scenario transforming from the current state to the future state with designated actions. But if you can’t change their mindset, the change result won’t be sustainable.

Let go of “the voices from the past,” reprogram people's minds with new thinking, norms, and attitudes; and establish a blueprint for how you want to create the future reality via change continuum. Initiate “looking, listening, questioning, understanding, planning, testing and collaborating” change continuum. If at some intermediate stage, change management measures something that is not congruent with the final outcome, then dysfunctional behavior arises, diminishing the end-to-end change performance. Keep track of change outcomes, make appropriate adjustments on the way.

Iterative sequence-consequence cycle involves the continual attention to current changes in the organization and how this affects the future of the organization: A business process is a sequence of activities intended to produce a particular result. An organization system is an entity which maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts with a sequence of activities. The organizational management needs to predict which consequences can be created through action steps of strategic implementation, and how to make proper adjustments and continuous improvement.

To keep the teams and employees focused on the most important things, handle sequence & consequence of business initiatives, enforce logic and enhance accountability. If the sequence of events is based on "outside in '' data about customers, the end result is to transform the organization to increase its people centric maturity and build a culture to focus on creating value for their customers. Let's call it a sequence of experiences, leading to expected consequences - delightful customers, produce people-centric values.

Businesses today are not just working within the industry, but also permeating the cross business ecosystem. Business management is multidimensional, interweaving strategy management, change management, innovation management, performance management, through nonlinear logic. The path of going digital can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive, fitting your business strength. Business transformation is a thorny journey with many curves and bumps, roadblocks and pitfalls on the way.

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Illustratelogic

Business processes become more dynamic, information-driven, goal-driven and people-centric for adapting to the changing environment.

Business process management is to manage the known from the flow. With the awareness and understanding of all of the process flaws, organizations can begin to visualize both the need and means to create much better processes to manage business effectively.

 Business logic becomes nonlinear as organizations or human societies turn to be more hyper-connected, and interdependent. The management needs to explore varying methods & practices, clarify and verify key business success factors, to improve overall business performance.

It is advisable for any organization to adapt step by step process in building internal capability with it to enable strategy implementation: Processes define how basic and routine functions are executed consistently across the organization to implement strategy. Business processes should actually be born out of a strategy, Are processes functioning to deliver results consistent with the strategic intent?

The goal of process management is to eliminate unnecessary complications and reduce the burden of wasting business budgets or resources, while trying to stay current with ever-changing business environments. A new strategic initiative that involves the development of new business functions will require the definition of processes associated with those business functions. The process, however, needs periodical reviews to test if the process is understood by all and that produces expected outcomes.

Information empowered processes can be “smart” to build organizational capabilities structurally: When information flows into processes, then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. Information in the business world will not do anything unless it happens to be followed as a process. Processes without the appropriate enhancement of quality information will become out of context. Business Process Management acts as a kind of structure for Information Management which requires a decent amount of process changes, new process inclusion or optimization.

Processes are governed by information. With the awareness and understanding of all of the process flaws, businesses can begin to visualize both the need and means to create much better processes to manage information effectively. A smart process follows process management principles, but encourages innovation as well. A business process is "smart" when it accommodates controlled excursions away from what would otherwise be a rigid sequence of steps; infused processes with quality information to accomplish certain tasks fluently.

It’s important to integrate people-centric processes to ensure consistent abilities to deliver value as defined in the strategy: If an organization cannot give value to people, its brand name is not very impressive. People are more important than process. The management needs to ponder: Are processes becoming more people-centric? Are people acting in a way that is consistent with the strategy?

Many companies find it too difficult to solve people's problems so they try to hide them with either processes or technology in order to avoid confrontations with the result of solving people's problems. Processes/controls need to be designed based on people and the culture within an organization. The robustness of process means that there is robustness of loyal users, enabling innovation, empowering employees, and delivering measurable business results consistently.

Business processes become more dynamic, goal-driven and people-centric for adapting to the changing environment. Quality information enhances process quality; risk management is embedded into the process, to make the process and business as a whole agile and resilient.

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Innovativeagilist

Agilists are phenomenally disciplined in focusing on value, prioritizing, executing, and collaboration.

With accelerated speed, everything is always moving forward promptly. Agility is about making progressive movements with the very characteristics of interaction, incrementalism, and improvement. Regardless of which flavor of agility practices you explore, you need to follow agile principles, people over process, change over documents, make continuous adjustments.

Assessing the current state of business agility: Running a successful business is about driving changes and creating values. Most managers do not realize that they are change agents in their daily functions. It’s important to increase the agility with which the organization is able to not only adapt to changes, but also drive changes proactively. Assessing the current state of agility; defining a clear goal is a helpful instrument to guide yourself, your team, your business, your relations along the other dimensions to shape agile culture and mindset, build the right set of processes and practices to lead needed changes effectively.

Increasing agility is not a one-time activity, but an iterative continuum: With respect to Agile, one doesn't become agile overnight. It takes a lot of energy to break old habits, outdated thought processes, get out of the comfort zone, and change part of your routine to become more interactive, informative, and innovative. Agility should not be translated to sacrificing guidelines, planning or development cycle of products/services. Accountability goes hand in hand with the delegation of authority or power. Shared accountability or collective accountability involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, trustful relationship and collaboration.

Agility is the measure of ability to recognize, act and benefit from changing business circumstances: Agility, versatility, and resilience are good enough choices. People can self-assess, self-develop in well-built hybrid working environments. Besides being able to do something different, to take the step further, people should be willing to do things they’ve never done before, explore the new possibilities with a growth mindset. Agility is a means to an end. To what end in your case? Work out what you want agility for; identify early "warning signs" across the board, and open many doors for pre-emptive and prescribed interventions. A measure that Agile is a journey, not a destination; it’s more as a "direction" than an "end."

Agilists are phenomenally disciplined in focusing on value, prioritizing, executing, and collaboration. Agile success can improve the entire business competencies because they can do things quicker and better, encouraging improvement and innovation.

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Illumination

Isn't a tough journey to- celebrate #10,800 blog postings - to pursue- the digital way of brainstorming, innovating, motivating, story-telling?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 10 million page views with 10,800+ blog postings 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. Here is the weekly insight of innovation leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Innovation Innovation is a unique business capability to reinvent business. Innovation journey is like taking a hiking trip at the trail, very few or even no people have ever gone before. It takes courage, intelligence, and emotional maturity. There are many components in an effective innovation environment or ecosystem, each by themselves may not cause a creative environment, but collectively, they can build a set of unique innovation capabilities.

Initiatives Business is complex nowadays, organizations have a variety of stakeholders, behind many critical business initiatives, there are numerous reference points of varying stakeholders. To manage business initiatives successfully, quality information, goal driven processes, and logical scenarios are needed to achieve high performance results.

Innovativeformalization 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.

Infuseinnovativeness 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.

Innateability Organizational capability is the means to an end for achieving certain business performance. An organization would need to ask whether they need the capability at the base level to sustain the business, or at differentiating level to be the key differentiator for the business.

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking of new ideas; sharing and innovating. 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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Innovation

Innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context, we need to develop differentiated innovation capability systematically.

Innovation is about creating novel ideas and generating differentiated values. There are many characteristics of innovation. We all should broaden the points of interest and try new things to develop talent, spur innovation. 

Psychologically, being innovative is a state of mind that combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement to find innovative solutions that will produce great results and make continuous accomplishment.

Innocent: Innovators are usually positive thinkers; they get less polluted by negative vibes, discover new possibilities and alternative ways to do things. They are free-minded; not compromised with mediocrity or conventional wisdom, but keep expanding their knowledge and deepening understanding. Innovators are intellectually curious to understand things from different angles; innocent to clean up outdated practices; inclusive to embrace diverse points of view; and appreciate the global differences. They don’t always follow others but discover their own unique path for experiencing new things, experimenting with alternative solutions.

Being innovative is a state of mind to create new, but break down the old. Be “PURE” and focus on important things, but be sophisticated enough to solve complex problems. Innovators take courage to break down the old-regardless of its old rules, outdated knowledge, career ceilings, or traditions which limit people’s opportunity and choices to tap creativity. They take risks in thinking and doing things differently. Therefore, the reputation of innocent innovators possibly gets hurt by conventional thinking, gossiping, and misjudgment. They have to deal with adversity calmly, think across boundaries, communicate creatively, connect the mind empathetically, build trust, and amplify their influence.

Illimitable: Everyone is entitled to their interpretation of the world. Does their perception enable them to be positive, balanced, and productive contributors in the larger society? Are they part of problems or part of solutions? People who innovate are change agents, not being afraid to challenge common beliefs, current understanding. They refuse to be bound by constraints and limitations and a pursuit of possibilities. They have illimitable curiosity to ask open-ended questions, putting more emphasis on knowledge sharing, innovation, and progress.

What had been previously thought impossible is now accepted as possible. Many innovative solutions to intriguing problems are made from a much broader and encompassing view that is not possible in conventional thinking. To gain “unconventional understanding” of the world, put aside all those trained thoughts, logic, systems and boxes for a while, and fill in illimitable imaginations, updated knowledge, and holistic understanding. So you are able to generate fresh ideas and create value unbelievably.

Infused: In the world of dynamic changes, innovation is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of freshness. To advance human society, there is always one clear issue: appreciate the brightness of innovation with the paradigm shift to reach the next level of advancement. Individually, in order to tap your potential, investigate your passion, discover your talent, infuse creative energy. There are ups & downs on the journey of innovation. Failure is part of success. Freshness of creativity can infuse passion, boost energy, demonstrate unique strength, and build differentiated professional competency.

Innovations fail because there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a vision and the process of turning it into a reality. Resilience is about bouncing, turning around tough situations, dealing with challenges on the innovation paths courageously. In a world that has been transformed by information technologies, infuse innovativeness into every aspect of the organization and human society, make a paradigm shift from industrial economy to knowledge economy to creative economy.

Innovation has a broader spectrum, hybrid nature, and deep context, we need to develop differentiated innovation capability systematically. Real societal progress is made through the work of foreseeable leaders and business professionals who can figure out how to trend the future, inspire innovation, and capture the great opportunities to unleash collective human potential forethoughtfully.

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ITinnovation

Innovation only exists in the more open environments that create insights, take advantage of all sources of creativity in an open way and leap innovation management to the next level.

Within abundant information and emergent digital technologies, Information technology is a key component of holistic business mindset to re-imagine “what is possible” - unleashing business potentials and improving business efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity. 

The “art of possible” to reinvent business in the digital age is to deliver the value of information in helping businesses grow, delight customers and do more with innovation.

        IT Innovation

ITinnovation Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment, to keep knowledge flow and idea flow. The emergence of potential opportunities for business growth is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern, it requires the balance of courage and caution, learning and doing, standardization and innovation, stability and speed. It takes structural thinking and planning upon strategic fit, structural capability, risk intelligence and executable business mode to produce great outcomes consistently .

IT Innovation Upon rapid change and exponential growth of information, IT now makes significant impacts on almost every aspect of the business. IT is more like glue than a tool for integrating all important business elements into the business innovation capability. IT plays a crucial role in creating a disciplined and managed space for developing and testing new models, products/services, and innovative problem-solving approaches.

Innovative ITFrom industry surveys, the majority of IT organizations are still being perceived as maintenance center, most employees outside of IT don’t call their IT teams very innovative, yet most believe technology is growing in importance, so IT leaders are facing unprecedented pressures to transform their IT into value center and innovation engines, but how to run an innovate IT, what’re the roadblocks one need to overcome, and which capabilities IT needs to cultivate?

IT InnovationTechnology is pervasive and the information is abundant, business initiatives and digital transformation today nearly always involve some form of technology implementation or information processing. IT plays a significant role in managing information-knowledge-insight cycle and fostering innovation by leveraging disruptive technologies and enriched information flow. One of the most appropriate tiles for CIOs is “Chief Innovation Officer,” who plays a critical role in orchestrating innovation symphony. Here are five critical components in the IT innovation management playbook.

InitiativesofIT IT is impacting every business unit and is becoming the driver of business transformation. To truly reach the premium management, IT leaders have to reach out to their business peers horizontally, add value to any organization if it understands the various business lines needs and wants; provide cross line synergies by understanding the various functions, and bring up the most business value.

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thoughts; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making an influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 15 million page views with 10800+ blog postings. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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Illuminategalvanize

Can we see beyond -what all others see; look at -where “things” would go, feel the horizon in which- we are able to -create momentum, turn around -tough situations, galvanize confidence, to-make influence, consistently?

Future is uncertain,

full of mysteries;

history starts-

fading away, gradually;

there are -

frictions, obstacles,

on the way to -

move forward,

unexpectedly…


Galvanize inspiration to-

look ahead,

explore our minds and bodies to-

unleash latent potential,

inherent in our genes;

develop talent,

accelerate performance,

diligently..

Information is confluent,

but sometimes, confusing,

galvanize understanding,

as the path in pursuit of-

wisdom is thorny,

but lead us to -

discover truth,

unpuzzle mythes;

explore the purpose of -

humanity, hopefully.


Galvanize passion,

for putting efforts to -

do worthwhile things;

initiate open dialogues,

learn, relearn,

galvanize change,

gain traction on -

a powerful theme of -

growth, renewal, transcendentally.

Galvanize influence,

some trends are-

more significant than-

others in their impact;

it is easy to -

work alone,

take the attitude of -

competition,

but it is -

much more difficult to-

collaborate with -

different parties,

even competitors to -

overcome common challenges,

inclusively.

Can we see beyond -

what all others see;

look at -

where “things” would go,

feel the horizon in which-

we are able to -

create momentum,

turn around -

tough situations,

galvanize confidence, to-

make influence,

consistently?

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Informationgray

Information gray is what leads to a decrease in imagination, miscommunication, ineffective problem-solving.

In face of continuous disruptions, the mixed quality of information, the traditional top-down linear management style is frequently criticized for its silo, inflexibility, bureaucracy, unresponsiveness, or simply, lack of innovation. It’s important to understand that dynamic business development is multifaceted and gains an impartial perspective on how to eliminate unconscious bias and uncover the “shade of gray.”

 Organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment, break down outdated concepts or rules and set up fitting principles and processes, strike the right balance of “old experience” and “new ways to do things”; to accelerate business performance and improve agility.

Information is overwhelming, the business 'greyscale' area is often murky, and it can be frightening: "Unknown” is inherent in today’s business dynamic and it is often caused by the nature of randomness or chaos. It’s unpredictable and lacks a stable pattern or order. Although business leaders today can’t predict every turn or curve on the business transformation journey, quality information and fresh insight allow them to envision emerging opportunities and predict risks timely. It takes vision, updated knowledge, and courage for making a smooth change and the large scale business transformation.

Business transformation can't happen unless and until the critical mass of knowledge professionals are prepared to work in 'greyscale' and accept a large degree of unknowns. Therefore, it’s important to build high-performance teams with the heterogeneous group setting, complementary skills, and distinctive capabilities. Although each individual has limitations, collective insight from an inclusive and competitive team with cognitive differences and a variety of expertise helps to deal with the inevitable unknown, and overcome insurmountable toughness facing organizations.

In some businesses, misunderstanding is prevailing and leads to conflicts, blind spots, bottle necks, gray areas in a variety of management, causing business malfunctioning: Business dynamic creates many blind spots and generates quite a few gaps because of its “VUCA” characteristics. With the increasing speed of changes and constant disruptions, many organizations are inundated with information, tactical tasks and daily operational duties. It is important for creating both internal and external beliefs around how business management is a movement for enablement and improvement. Silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resources, process, capacity, and capability. It is important to identify the choke points of the business management -when the responsibilities are being created and how to improve business effectiveness by understanding the interrelationship of timing, group, and business practices, enhance accountability.

In order to identify decision blind spots, business performance bottlenecks, management gray areas, people can make further inquiries by diagnosing the root causes of problems and spend enough time on scrutinizing the long term strategy by questioning: Can you provide logical reasoning to help find out what is really happening? Can you see the bigger picture and not live on day-to-day busyness only? Can you capture the contextual insight beneath the surface? Are you skeptical of common belief or common sense in your group which perhaps does not fit the new circumstances anymore? The business needs to define strategy, profitability, and relevance at any given time to break through bottlenecks, handle gray areas, and avoid pitfalls on the path to strategy management.

In terms of risk avoidance and the risk-tolerance, there is a gray area in between, the key is balance: Business opportunities and risks are co-existing in the organizations nowadays. Every opportunity has risks embedded in it; and every risk might bring opportunities. To survive and thrive amid constant changes, companies must learn how to manage the “shade of gray” due to blurred territories and ambiguous conditions. It is crucial to refine fresh insight enabling business leaders or professionals to make better decisions on taking or avoiding risks accordingly.

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring business transformation is likely to follow nonlinear patterns with exponential speed. Philosophically, there isn't always a right or wrong choice in any situation and there are a lot of grays between risk avoidance and risk-tolerance. To improve organizational resilience, organizations should investigate hidden risks or uncover gray areas, and manage them effectively. The key is balance, give enough autonomy to the business management for taking or avoiding risks, and put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings.

Information gray is what leads to a decrease in imagination, miscommunication, ineffective problem-solving. Organizational leaders and professionals should take multidimensional lenses to perceive the multi-facet world, leverage interdisciplinary expertise to understand complex problems, develop a shared view that promotes a deeper understanding of core processes, structures and differentiated competency, adjust business attitude, investigate "hidden risks'' or uncover gray areas, to improve business quality, agility, and resilience.

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Innovationgaps

Digital enlarges the thinking and capability gaps because different organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed.

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still., bridging the gap of opportunity between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge, it is important to identify and strengthen the weakest link and take a stepwise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.

              

Innovation Gaps

Innovationgaps Digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous, with increasing speed of change and abundant information. The gap is created when there is a diversity of thinking, difference between demand and supply, shortage of capability for tomorrow and capacity for today.

Innovationgaps There are many forms of innovation - technology, application, product, design, business model, process, communication, or customer experience, etc; there’re also many ‘flavors’ of innovations, systematic innovation, customer-centric innovation, open innovation, design-driven innovation, or management innovation., etc, but fundamentally, what are the innovation gaps, the gap differentiation helps delineate the problems and opportunities for innovation, and through identifying such gaps, business can manage innovation portfolio more effectively.

Innovative ITgaps Because more often than not, technology is the disruptive force of innovation, and information is the very clue about developing the next and best products or service, as well as delighting customers. A great CIO with their finger on the pulse of technological advancement or information insight can provide many ideas on how new technology and abundance of information can create fresh new opportunities. The point is: What are innovation gaps organizations need to bridge, how can a CIO build a solid innovation agenda, and play such a digital role more effectively?

InnovationGaps With today's emphasis on innovation per se and its importance to corporate survival, it is common knowledge that innovation management requires the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including organization, investments, and assets. The board can contribute to both innovation management and management innovation. Innovation governance at the board level is critical to improving the overall innovation management success.

Innovation Gap Although innovation is at every forward-looking organization’s agenda, there are at least two gaps existing in innovation management: idea gap and execution gap. More often than not, companies seem to continue to have more ideas than execution expertise. If you have an idea, you gain only if you have the right methodology to implement the idea. However, there’re gaps between innovation strategy and innovation execution, how to mind it?

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 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 innovation.

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Initiatives

Organizations are experimenting, exploring, learning the lessons, developing the best and next practices to leverage digital learning and build core competencies to deal with complexity smoothly.

The business and human world become more complex and diverse, it’s always critical to gain sufficient knowledge and unique insight to perceive holistically, observe deeper and see around the corner, have an in-depth understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario, take initiatives to improve organizational productivity, agility, innovation, flexibility, and resilience.

It’s a strategic imperative to create conditions in the context of future demands: What kind of business initiatives are critical to accelerate business performance, overcome challenges? Why should the business invest in what you are proposing? Organizational management needs to periodically make objective assessments of the current state and future state of business, identify capability gaps in the context of future need, capability dependency or business capability reliance on technology capability, etc, make related investment calculations, etc.

Each organization has its own philosophy, disciplines, as well as specific measurable goals and objectives they have to hit through investing in business. The well-established companies need small strategic initiatives for engaging in disruptive innovation, as those small strategic initiatives need a big company's value, culture, resource and financial backup. While the small startup also takes bold moves, investing in breakthrough types of initiatives to gain their niche customers, with high returns and high risks, they should create conditions to catch future demands and unlock performance smoothly.

It’s important to enhance the current allocation of responsibilities between executives, line managers, and solution providers: Nowadays the digital world has become so hyper-connected and interdependent, it takes across disciplinary practices to deal with increasing pace of changes. The more diverse, the more regulated, the more geographically dispersed an organization is or becomes, the more important to make better resource/talent alignment and responsibility allocation. It’s no surprise that we will see more interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and cross-functional collaboration.

For crucial business initiatives, make logical and operational construction of a selection of aspects, judged relevant by people having strong expertise, with the purpose to predict future needs, bring selected observable aspects of the organization, and hopefully open enough to question the selection. Also, business leaders and managers should harness communication, enhance horizontal connectivity, and hierarchical accountability to achieve high performance results.

It’s critical to build pathways for depicting interdependence in business context: People are interdependent whole; organizations are interdependent whole, and global societies are interdependent whole with multifaceted aspects. Business issues are multifaceted; these dimensions interact and mutually influence each other, expressing that interaction as an emergence of a new worldview very different from the previous industrial era.

In order to bring a holistic viewpoint and handle complex problems effectively, business management needs to break down silo and conventional understanding; integrate different stereotyped viewpoints; perceive the emerging trends, set the right priority, use resources scientifically. Business leaders understand the interdependence of issues, recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in the circumstances, then intentionally adjust the mindset and behaviors in order to exert influence in that context.

Organizations are experimenting, exploring, learning the lessons, developing the best and next practices to leverage digital learning and build core competencies to deal with complexity smoothly. High performing organization is at the higher state of being the collaborative interdependent one, at every turn, with incremental goal achieving, creative idea brainstorming, breakthrough innovation and effective change management.

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