The Best “Discovery” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr. 2019

Discovery is the trait of innovators because innovation is all about discovering the new way to do things.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Discovery” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Discovery is the choice to look at something differently and by that choice never look at anything the same.

2 Discovery is a process of revealing unknown facts. Discovery is the perception and awareness of the uniqueness in the field of the ordinary.

3 Discovery is realizing something or having the experience of something that therefore has not been known to you or known only as a concept, but now is alive to you.

4 Discovery is the trait of innovators because innovation is all about discovering the new way to do things.

5 The word "discovery" refers to "knowledge" because the more you read and learn, the more you will realize that there are more you don’t know yet.

6 Discovery starts with an open mind and fresh eyes; it is a new way to see and perceive the things; it is a life experience and adventure.

7 Insightful digital leaders with “discovery eyes” can discover the “diamond in the rough, “see through character, discover potential, capture substance, and abstract quintessential.

8 Human potential is limitless; the best way to go on discovering what we are capable of doing is by following our insights, intuitions, and imagination while at the same time keeping our feet firmly on the ground.

9 Discovery is 'the journey of life,' as each day we discover something previously unknown to us; discover something others ignore or take the path without just following others’ footsteps.

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Reimagine Digital Organization - Design for Harmony

Digital organizations are dynamic and hyperconnected, with business attributes such as responsiveness, engagement, adaptability, flexibility, innovativeness, and resilience, etc. 

We slowly, but steadily move to the era with an abundance of knowledge, endless information, and abundance of ideas. Digital organizations today increasingly exhibit sophisticated characteristics such as hyperconnectivity, nonlinearity, interdependence, etc, in various shades, extensiveness, and intensity. There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the places, which bring both opportunities and risks, unique scenes and hidden pitfalls. Digital dynamism doesn’t just mean volatility or uncertainty. With effective leadership and masterful design and orchestration, digital organizations can be operated as high-performance and high mature business catalyzed by diversification, versatility, and intelligence. It’s important to create a business context in which people are empowered and respected to create the business synergy that is the essence of the business harmonization.

Harmonizing working relationships: Many organizations are slowly but steadily moving from an overly rigid organizational hierarchy to a more flexible and flatter structure. Gone are the days where organizations can dictate the parameters of the working relationship via top-down command and control style. Management has become an art out of necessity to address the current business relationship between the employee and organization by working as high performing and creative teams, having a common understanding of business strategy, clarifying both internal and external beliefs around how the business is a movement for the business enablement and improvement, and giving everyone a voice in how the organization and the people in it can prosper and thrive. Create a harmonized working environment by communicating smoothly to make collective decisions and taking a collaboration road to achieve strategic goals and make continuous deliveries. Further, The dynamic path of going digital should provide a holistic business management view, allow for the review of workplace design, decision-making structure tuning, and talent performance management improvement. The design of a digital organization will have a significant impact on how to enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration in order to reach a state of harmony.

Harmonizing organizational processes and speed: Business transformation often means you need to fine-tune the underlying organizational structures, optimize organizational processes and adjust business speed to streamline information flow, idea flow, and business flow. If the strategic intent of organizational design can be understood across the organization, the business strategic alignment process could become an analytical “e-harmony” process in which the actual configuration of organizational strategy is a consequence of design and implementation. In reality, many organizations today are operated between the mix of old and new; different departments or divisions within the company are run at varying speed. Plus, there’s a pendulum swinging between people and process, engagement and efficiency; innovation and standardization, etc, the business frictions seem to be inevitable. To improve organizational responsiveness and performance, the digital platforms enabled by emerging technologies, efficient communication & collaboration apps or tools can help to lubricate business processes, flatten organizational hierarchies, and keep the business harmonized to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Harmonize business leadership and management: If the business management in the industrial age is based on “command and control” style to build a certain order from chaos, survive from the scarcity of resources and fierce competitions; and then, digital leadership is more about influencing, mentoring, harmonizing and orchestrating toward the next level of the organizational maturity. Pursuing digital business maturity is an evolutionary journey, with the phases of blueprinting, designing, and optimizing the business architecture, fine-tuning the key factors of the organizations such as people, process, and technology, to achieve business harmony, reach high-performance results and unleash the organizational potential. With rapid changes, the exponential growth of information and shortened knowledge cycle, to lead the journey effortlessly, digital leaders and managers today should have open nature and learning agility, indefatigably absorb fresh knowledge, embrace diversified viewpoint, leverage systems thinking to overcome silo mentality, and gain an in-depth business understanding across the spectrum of a local/specific to global/holistic/systemic/ interdisciplinary elaboration.

Digital organizations are dynamic and hyperconnected, with business attributes such as responsiveness, engagement, adaptability, flexibility, innovativeness, and resilience, etc. They have to adapt to the continuous changes and frequent disruptions and are able to reconfigure the organizational structure and change their own behaviors for their adaptation to environmental changes and ecosystem dynamics to achieve business harmony.

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The Weekly Insight of the “Future of CIO” 4/25/2019

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with 5500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The “Digital Master” book series includes 27 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to the businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Design for Adaptability Digital means fast-paced changes, continuous disruptions, overwhelming growth of information, and shortened business life cycle. Companies need to have an in-depth understanding of organizational design and development to improve business maturity. Compared to the traditional organizations with an overly rigid hierarchy or strictly pyramidal structure, digital organizations today are flatter, hybrid and more responsive to changes. Organizational adaptation is the ability to be highly responsive to the fast-changing business environment. High mature companies are designed for change and designed for innovating.

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile II Digital organizations are like complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. The contemporary corporate board as a top leadership team plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy management and exemplifying leadership effectiveness. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any organization should get out of the mental boxes shaped in the considerably static or linear industrial age; break down outdated conventional thinking, absorb current information or knowledge, fill out blind spots by embracing fresh insight, become more flexible and proactive to drive change and digital transformation.

Three Perspectives of Running High-Proficient IT With “VUCA” digital new normal, great opportunities, dangers, and disruptions are around every corner. Running a highly proficient IT means a lot of things that IT has to master, such as operational excellence, innovation, performance, change, consolidation, integration, modernization, optimization, intelligence, value creation, speed, and maturity, etc. In practice, today's IT organizations face a lot of obstacles and encounter many distractions stopping them from laser focusing on achieving strategic goals. Many IT organizations suffer from overloaded tasks and overwhelming information, how to overcome barriers to run high-proficient IT organization?

Three Practices to Fortify IT Transformation Due to rapid change, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. With vendors now offering cost-effective on-demand model IT services or solutions that business can utilize directly with almost no IT support, IT should feel competitive pressure to reinvent itself as a business differentiator. In practice though, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capacity within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. What are the best or next practices to fortify IT transformation?

“Five-Step” Openness in Innovation Management In the rapidly evolving businesses and dynamic economic systems, innovations are very complex but critical for firms' survival and thriving today. Some businesses try to force innovation via “command & control” management style, but it often does not work well. Because the business and economic environment play an important role, there are both tangible and intangible elements which need to be knitted into the unique innovation competency of the organization. Knowledge is important, but openness is more critical to spark innovation.

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

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The Best “Understanding” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr. 2019

The most important capability of cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Understanding” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information. How deep your understanding is based on logic, lenses, philosophy, mindsets, and methodologies you leverage to interpret things.

2 Assumptions and prejudices are due to a lack of deeper understanding. It is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding.

3 An understandable mind is a step closer to innovation, and two inches deeper to wisdom. Lack of knowledge is circumstantial; poor manner is forgivable, but superficiality or lack of in-depth understanding is often intolerable and create more problems in the world.

4 Often people follow conventional wisdom or others’ opinion and get stuck only at the level of content understanding without contextual intelligence. Lack of understanding leads to “fixing the symptom, not the root cause” syndrome.

5 Contextual understanding digs deeper, to touch the thought processes and logical reasoning, not only about word meaning but also about the tones and “wholeness.”

6 An understandable mind is a step closer to reach the wisdom which is an ultimate level of intelligence that is acquired and obtained from the culmination and compilation of knowledge gathered over many years.

7 Knowledge is concrete, intelligence is contextual, understanding is personal, and wisdom is abstract.

8 The most important capability of cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out knowledge, gain an in-depth understanding, address our ignorance and assumptions we make to minimize it.

9 Misunderstanding is the big cause of many human problems. Knowledge and understanding lead us to divine, beauty, truth, and understanding of the process of living.

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Three “Soaring Factors” to Accelerate IT Transformation

 Take the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity by leveraging these soaring factors to make digital IT more adaptive, energetic, and innovative.

With the fast pace of changes and exponential growth of information, IT becomes the building blocks of business competency and the key success factors of long-term business success. Regardless of which industry or the nature of the organization you are in, IT leaders need to get really creative on how they can create unique business value from piles of the abundance of information and commoditized technology; and how they can leverage those soaring factors to accelerate IT transformation?



Focus: Great opportunities, hidden risks, and continuous disruptions are around every corner. Nowadays, there are so many plates that enterprise IT needs to spin and keep balanced. The focus becomes an important factor to run a successful IT organization. But what exactly do IT leaders need to focus on? IT needs to become a strategic business partner by focusing on things that really matter for the business’s long-term perspective; working closely with customers to solve their critical issues; focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business to unlock business performance; focuses on building core business capabilities to catalyze growth and improve overall business competency, as well as focus on sustaining IT operations which is fundamental, but critical. On one side, make sure IT-enabled business systems run according to plans and performance; also keep an eye on the horizon - look for opportunities by assessing new technologies and mining information, determine viability and align with the strategic direction of the company. This can only be achieved through constantly engaging with business and customers, collecting their feedback, and ensuring all evolving parties staying at the same page to accelerate business transformation. When IT goes disoriented, gets distracted, loses focus, it perhaps turns out to be “good at nothing,” and become irrelevant soon.

Choice: From an IT management perspective, the choice is the basis for strategic positioning. Making strategic choice is not only about deciding what you are going to do but also about what you definitely are not going to do. IT leaders can only make the right choice and speed up change if they have reliable information to them and gain an in-depth understanding of the business and circumstances. Technology is the means to end, running proactive IT requires participation by the entire company. As requirements are gathered, managed, and discussed with executives and teams, IT has to oversee the full set of the requirements to ensure cohesiveness and to obtain the involvement of all related customers, users, and stakeholders. Tactically, IT can provide choices for businesses about communication content, the methodology they want, and use their language; provide choices for users and customers on how to solve their issues from their lens and provide the best-fit solutions to their problems; provide choices for talented IT employees on how they would like to get the work done, stop micromanagement and foster autonomy. Overall speaking, corporate IT has no choice but to embrace and accelerate transformational change or literally face extinction.

Shift: We are experiencing the major digital paradigm shift, IT organizations are shifting from being a monolithic back office support function to the mosaic business change catalyzer; IT management is shifting from controlling to enabling to innovating, and IT maturity is also shifting from being the pure technical specialist to being the trustful strategic partner and from surviving to striving to thriving mode. IT is also shifting from being a builder to an integrator and information broker. With the increasing speed of changes, the highly effective digital organization has a higher level of responsiveness and performance. IT can speed up and shorten the products or services delivery cycle by integrating multiple and different specialized commercial software components into customer-tailored solutions, not building from scratch. IT is shifting from technology focused to information-driven, manage frictionless information flow to ensure the right people can access the right information at the right time to make right decisions timely, bring better results and run a dynamic digital organization. The CIO's role is also in a major shift, from a tactical manager and a strategy implementer to a strategic business leader, or at least with the influential power to shape and keep in harmony with the business, market, products, and resources.

IT is not just technical, but rather business-driven. Take the strenuous effort on IT management effectiveness and maturity by leveraging these soaring factors to make digital IT more adaptive, energetic, integrated, flexible, versatile, nimble, reliable, and fast, with the goal to achieve the optimized performance and accelerate digital transformation.

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The Monthly “Digital Boardroom” Book Tuning: Bring Insight to the Boardroom Apr. 2019

Leadership is an influence, influence comes from progressive mindsets, profound insight, and proactive, step-wise actions.

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

           

  Bring Insight to the Boardroom  

Five Pillars of Strategic Board Businesses today are operated in a more volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and globally distributed world. You have to scan the external environment and make sure that you’re seeing patterns and trends that are going to have an impact on your company’s ability to continue to thrive and grow. Also, you need a directional guide from the top leadership team such as the corporate board to inspire, advise, and motivate. The effective functioning of a board depends on a number of factors, including the mix of knowledge and experience among the directors, diversity in thought processes, knowledge, experiences, industries, and situations are more important as a team.

How to Bridge Insight Gaps in the Boardroom Leadership is about envisioning and leading the business towards its future. Top leadership roles such as board directors are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise. In practice, the digital era is volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous. Many say that the multitude of gaps (thinking, knowledge, innovation, strategy execution, etc.) are enlarged because different industries, organizations, functions, and individuals evolve with varying speed. To lift up the board leadership maturity, minding the insight gap is challenging, but a critical step for improving leadership effectiveness. Leadership is an influence, influence comes from progressive mindsets, profound insight, and step-wise actions. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario.

The Corporate Board’s Diagnostic View of Digital Transformation Running a digital business is a change-innovation-problem-solving continuum. Going digital is all about the rapid changes with blurred functional, business, or industrial territories, and expanded organizational horizons. Stability is not equal to stagnation. The corporate board plays a significant role in the oversight of strategy management and digital transformation. Having the diagnostic view at the board level helps the management understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale up the transformation effort across the digital ecosystem effortlessly.

The Boardroom's Feedback Feedforward Practices Digital has the “VUCA” characteristics - velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It implies both business opportunities and risks on the way and change is a new normal. Corporate Board as a high-level governance body plays a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, as well as setting key tones in leadership exemplification and talent development. To overcome the challenges, boards need to develop their own set of digital best and next practice to improve both the organizational performance and their own performance.

The Digital Board with Global Competency Global competency is the ability to understand and act on issues of global significance or solve complex problems which have a global impact. Collectively, at the board level, global competency represents the global leadership, mindset, knowledge, insight, expertise, attitudes, skills, and behaviors necessary to thrive in today's hyper-connected and interdependent world.

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with 5500+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.

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The Best “Ingenuity” Quotes of “Digital Master” Apr. 2019

 Ingenuity is the qualification to be creative, insightful, and inventive.

"Digital Master” is the series of guidebooks (27+ books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, advises on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Ingenuity” quotes in “Digital Master.’

1 Ingenuity is often connotated with insight or perception; the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively.

2 Being ingenious needs more understanding, not less.

3 Ingenuity is the distant cousin of creativity, ingenuity often demands creativity as a mixed ingredient for puzzle-solving or invention.

4 Creativity is part of ingenuity which is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness.

5 Ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in an original and creative way.

6 Ingenuity is the qualification to be creative, insightful, and inventive.

7 Human ingenuity often involves some most complex thought processes such as creative thinking, Systems thinking, analytical thinking, etc, both individually and collectively.

8 Proactive attitudes, the blend of knowledge and ingenuity, and the right dose of confidence are all valid within the context of creative intelligence.

9 ingenuity can't be taught completely but needs to be discovered and developed by talented people on their own.

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“Five-Step” Openness in Innovation Management

Innovation needs to be the collective habit of the business, you have to live it and breathe it every day, otherwise, you don’t feel accomplished.

In the rapidly evolving businesses and dynamic economic systems, innovations are very complex but critical for firms' survival and thriving today. Some businesses try to force innovation via “command & control” management style, but it often does not work well. Because the business and economic environment play an important role, there are both tangible and intangible elements which need to be knitted into the unique innovation competency of the organization. Knowledge is important, but openness is more critical to spark innovation. Here is the “five-step” openness in innovation management.

Listening: Innovation happens at the intersection of people and organization. The goal of innovation is usually either for solving customers’ problems creatively or improving the business performance innovatively. Thus, communication is key to the success of innovation management. Organizations are social realities that emerge from the communication patterns of people. In business reality, often communication problems are rampant in the business world. Innovation leaders need to involve customers and different stakeholders, encourage people to speak, actively listening to what they say, collect their feedback, engage them in both idea creation and implementation processes. To truly understand people’s concerns and solve their problem creatively, it’s important to listen attentively, explore information selectively to find the special clue about the critical issues, see things through different angles, discover the potential answers or solutions, all of which can open your mind and make communication invaluable for ultimate innovation success.

Mirroring: Mirroring is about developing the reciprocal relationship to gain mutual trust. It’s about enforcing understanding, asking open-ended questions, and initiating thought-provoking conversations. Traditional managers are used to telling rather than asking. But for spurring creativity and catalyzing innovation, asking open-questions is great to evoke responses, keep conversation flow, enlighten or illustrate specific issues or topics to stimulate out-of-the-box thinking or generate great ideas. Communication is the coordination mechanism that makes organizations possible and makes a group of people as a cohesive team to generate fresh ideas, continually innovate and improve to achieve more. Many companies leverage digital platforms or collaboration tools to develop innovation clusters or hubs cross physical boundaries for enabling people exchanging ideas, brainstorming solutions to tough problems, enforcing the culture of learning, and building trust to enforce innovation.

Validating: There are two sides of managing ideas. On one hand, you need to improve idea flow; it is important to build an environment that is conducive to communication and collaboration to ensure there are abundant ideas flow; on the other hand, actually, the real challenge to innovation management is how to accelerate idea validation and streamline innovation management processes. Keep an open mind but take a scientific approach for idea validation. Because organizations have limited resources and time; before the ideation, companies need to discover insights; after ideation, it’s important to filter, prototype, and validate those ideas. The results of those ideas depend on the ability of the company to set the right priority, select the best ideas based on both the strategic business goals and capacities, develop and implement them, to maximize the business value.

Empathizing: Empathy is a fundamental component of the design for developing intuitive products or services. It’s about taking other’s position and understand the problems you intend to solve from their angles. For customer-centric innovation, always evolve customers in innovation management scenario, be open about their thoughts or opinions, put customers’ shoes on to gain customer empathy. From an innovation management perspective, design, empathy, and humanities are interconnected, develop empathic relationship and spirit among customer experience design team members; make people feel involved in the design and implementation scenario, show the customer that you are making a significant innovation investment and put great amount of effort to deliver intuitive products, services, or solutions which more closely meet their needs.

Empowering: In an ideal digital workforce, empowerment is the mantra for developing the digital ready workforce and shaping a culture of innovation. It’s radically different from the hierarchical and command-control style of management. It requires openness, trustworthiness, flexibility, etc, as key ingredients of innovation leadership. A leader who encourages innovation, first of all, needs to allow an innovator to bend the rules as long as it is not harmful to the organization. Innovation leaders need to have the right dose of risk appetite to encourage innovation and present risk intelligence as a cautious optimist. Empowerment, like communication, is very much a two-way street. It's important that everyone now has the expectations in a new way of working. Surely it doesn’t mean to make people cozy and get stuck in the comfort zone, individuals or team need to earn the level of trust. Management can give full empowerment to a matured individual or team, but not to a team that is not mature enough.

Digital innovation has an expanded scope and it is benefiting the widest audience of the digital ecosystem. The open atmosphere is critical for the success of innovation management. Digital leaders today can harness innovation by practicing open leadership styles, enforcing communication & collaboration, and facilitating joyful teamwork. Innovation needs to be the collective habit of the business, you have to live it and breathe it every day, otherwise, you don’t feel accomplished.

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The Monthly Keyword Summary: Potentiality Apr. 2019

Performance keeps your business running, churning numbers whereas potential can leap your company up to the next level of the business growth and maturity.

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about future, change, and influence. However, digital leadership trends will continue to emerge. Here is a set of featured blogs to dig into the “keywords” of the 21st century to brainstorming the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

 Potentiality

Unleash Business Potential and Accelerate Digital Maturity Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, reinventing the business to get digital ready takes both bold leadership and strategic planning, navigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form, in order to evolve change and accelerate digital maturity.

Five Characteristics of “Being Digital” Going digital is all about the rapid changes, blurred functional, business or industrial territories, expanded organizational horizons, and ever-evolving digital ecosystem. The digital transformation makes a significant impact on almost every aspect of the business from people; process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. It does make a smaller world, but also makes businesses more complex and interdependent. Here are the five characteristics of “being digital.”

Performance vs. Potential - Which One is More Crucial? Performance is how someone has performed in the past plus the present in various related contexts/ jobs. The potential is how one might perform in a different context or within the same context as a result of growth, maturity, skill development, or capability shaping, etc. Performance keeps the business running; and potential moves the business to the next level; so performance vs. potential, how shall you assess them objectively; are organizations really buying-in to talent development? In this day and age of instant up-to-the-minute information of stock performance and earnings reports that are due on a quarterly basis, what are the real odds of companies that actually put in the time to develop their human capital so employees would achieve their full potential, and ultimately organizations can grow into a Digital Master?

Three “P” Factors for Assessing Digital Fitness Digital fit starts with people fit. People are always the weakest link in organizations. So, part of the digital transformation journey is to prepare people for the new paradigm shift and to recognize this is a crucial step. The point is that how you know for sure that people being called “talent,” are really fit, how do you know you are putting the right people in the right position to solve the right problems? Here are three “P” factors for evaluating digital fitness.

Bridging the Potential Gap Organizations today need both performance and potential. Performance keeps your business running, churning numbers etc, whereas potential looks at an employee that can bring your company to the next level, and the collective human potential in the organization is the greatest thing the organization should ever invest in, because it is the driving force to catalyze the business growth and build the unique organizational advantage the competitors cannot beat. So, how to understand both potential and performance at the deeper level, bridge the gap to unleash the collective potential and accelerate business performance to the next level?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting the minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 2.8 million page views with about #5500 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating the new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes the time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

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The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile II

Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative, and influential. 

Digital organizations are like complex systems that are dynamic, self-evolving, self-adaptable, and self-perpetuating. The contemporary corporate board as a top leadership team plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy management and exemplifying leadership effectiveness. Due to the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility of the digital era, the directorship in any organization should get out of the mental boxes shaped in the considerably static or linear industrial age; break down outdated conventional thinking, absorb current information or knowledge, fill out blind spots by embracing fresh insight, become more flexible and proactive to drive change and digital transformation. Here is a set of the corporate board director's digital profile II.

A foresightful digital trendsetter: The board director is the top leadership role; leadership is all about direction and change. The fact is that change is happening at a much faster pace than ever before, requiring much more rapid response in order to survive and thrive. Digital leadership is the adventure to explore unknown, have confidence and insight to navigate the business on the right path. At the board level, vision helps to predict the macro trends, assist in "seeing" and bringing clarity to the future within the business ecosystem and beyond. A clear vision is a good combination of perception, prediction, and precision. The vision thing matters in the boardroom because it helps to advocate forward-thinking, to predict, prepare and overcome the challenges and uncertainty on the way to the future. By focusing forward, businesses are able to more accurately judge the coming learning curves and obstacles to changes in their path. Visionary board leaders have a clear choice among future scenarios that advocates future trends, set digital principles and trends, shape advanced mindsets, and promote certain behaviors. It is through identifying the “destination,” BoDs can steer the organization into the uncharted water and blurred territories, focus on what the organization needs to look like, alongside the impetus and sense of urgency, toward the destination steadfastly.

An insightful problem-definer: Corporate boards oversee business strategy and fundamentally, strategy development is a scenario of diagnosing business problems, making choices, and taking actions to achieve well-defined goals. Corporate boards need to become the co-problem-definer for framing some most important issues at the strategic level because often they can delegate the responsibility of problem-solving to the management. The point is, framing the right problem is equally or even more important than solving it. To be a good problem-definer, BoDs need to gain deep insight into how things work just by analyzing the aggregates, not necessary to dive into the details. Tactically, framing the right question more often needs to step back or get out of the box, in order to look at the problem from a different angle or understand the issues holistically. Often, the corporate board directors can bring the outlier’s view and many of them have an interdisciplinary understanding of crucial business problems, frame bigger thinking boxes, and approach problems technically, scientifically and culturally, mainly at the strategic level. Because problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem without causing too many side effects, or just taking the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom. The BoDs as “Problem-Definer” should understand what is exactly wrong, the exact description of the problem, and how to frame the right problems for solving. Thus, the board directors need to have sharp eyes to identify problems and unique insight to identify the problem and pinpoint the root causes. Otherwise, fixing the wrong cause of a problem will create more gaps and lead to even more serious problems later on.

A progressive talent master: Corporate governance has a responsibility to set good policies and updated rules for shaping the collective enterprise mindset, encourage a positive attitude, and influence behavior. Good directorship is about creating the greatest value to groom top leaders and guide talent development. Boards oversee business strategies, a solid talent strategy needs to be well-defined based on the business’s long-term perspective well mixing with short-term needs. Board inspiration and motivation can come from any type of personal interaction. The main goal of modern talent management is to put the right people in the right position with the right capability to solve the right problems. More specifically, board directors can contribute to talent development by setting good policies. They can brainstorm the good talent strategy by asking the management critical questions such as: How do you define talent? How do you measure talent? How do you know a candidate’s talent? How do you know what talent is required for each job? Do you know what talent gaps existing and how to fill them correctly? How do you leverage the emerging technologies to do talent analytics effectively, and use alternative digital channels to recruit the right talent? How do you differentiate potential from the performance? And how do you match a candidate’s talent to the talent demanded by the job? Etc. To look forward, today’s BoD and talent managers must isolate and address a much broader array of talent risks and take into account a critical need to craft a solid talent strategy that supports business strategy and human capital investment in a consistent and progressive way. To put simply, the board needs to help management identify talent gaps, identify talent bench strength and weakness, forecast talent management capacity, and measure talent to reflect the business value with accuracy.

Digital transformation is a radical change. We are on the advancing journey of moving from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy to a creative digital economy. Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. There is no static standard or cookie-cutting approach to select the great board leaders. Forward-looking boards continue to add the new blood for enforcing digital acumen, bring fresh eyes to see things differently, inspire diversity of thoughts to capture global insight, with the goal to shape a strategic board to improve top leadership maturity.

The Corporate Board Director's Digital Profile Blog Series

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profiles 

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile II

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital profile III 

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile IV

The Corporate Board Director’s Digital Profile V

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Three Practices to Fortify IT Transformation

IT needs to reenergizing itself and fortify digital transformation by contributing to business growth, innovation, or customer experience optimization. 

Due to rapid change, fierce competition, and continuous disruptions often led by technologies, IT can no longer feel like it has a monopoly on delivering solutions to the business. With vendors now offering cost-effective on-demand model IT services or solutions that business can utilize directly with almost no IT support, IT should feel competitive pressure to reinvent itself as a business differentiator. In practice though, there is the gap between the aspirations of what IT could do to the business versus what the current IT “mentality” and capacity within the respective IT department is capable of providing and enabling. What are the best or next practices to fortify IT transformation?

Fortifying the ownership mentality: Traditional IT organizations are often overloaded and understaffed, take orders from internal users, and fix issues to keep the lights on reactively. They are perceived as a support desk and cost center. There are too many excuses on why work and stress loads are at their current levels. To improve IT performance and maturity, it’s important to fortify the ownership mentality and run IT as a business. IT leaders need to work closely with business management to co-develop the organizational strategy and develop a collaborative environment in which IT is fully engaged with the business to prioritize and solve real problems, rather than just reluctantly align with the business to fix symptoms. People at all levels need to fully understand the issue and decide to remedy it. Unfortunately, in reality, the stove-pipe functional silos and bureaucratic management style are still prevalent and all too often fighting for who owns what versus who should and run it best. The key here is to run IT with a software startup mentality and gradually institutionalize and communicate digital transformation with the business, keep information and ideas flow frictionlessly throughout the organization. When IT leaders are equipped with the ownership mentality, they can have better self-awareness, get a holistic understanding of the business, gain the courage to step out of the comfort zone, work across the boundaries, have the right dose of risk appetite, and manage risks in a structural way.

Fortify IT-driven change/innovation agenda: The CIO role has never been just about managing the status quo. They need to be able to recognize the struggles of the company by understanding the business beyond IT, fortify IT-driven change and innovation agenda, to ensure their organization is ready for change, space and time are made to scope, plan, and execute, but not through ad-hoc activities. The most valuable change is innovation. The digital shift in some industries is to be innovative with systems of engagement because innovation often happens at the intersection of people and technology; customers and businesses. The lightweight technology and mosaic style of service model just make innovation easier to do now than in the past, less costly and more accessible. The new technology tools and business models allow a company to capture customer information on a continual basis. Building a customer-centric business is in every forward-thinking organization’s top executive agenda. IT needs to be closer to the end customers and do more with innovation. It is important to have IT resources, assets, and talent aligned with business strategies and objectives to build innovation as the core competency of the company.

Fortify IT performance to achieve multidimensional business value: Bottom-line thinking is one of the great limitations of modern IT organizations. Many IT organizations which often get stuck at the lower level of organizational maturity tend to measure themselves against trivial things IT considers important but are often less important and impactful through the business lens. The true IT value is hard to derive from support services since measuring productivity can be elusive and difficult to quantify. To refine IT reputation, "measuring up" is intriguing but it is crucial for IT to be perceived as a strategic business partner. IT leaders have to be able to demonstrate in very tangible ways that IT understands the business, fortify IT performance, and develop a systematic measurement approach to assessing its multi-dimensional value beyond just monetary benefit. It is true that the majority of IT organizations still cannot articulate their economic value to the board or shareholders in a language they understand and performance metrics alone will not solve the problem. IT leaders need to be not only good at creating value, measure them right, but also know how to convey them persuasively and lead to recognition of the efforts by the executive peers, and thus, the perception of the value of IT, to enforce IT as the trustful business partner.

IT needs to reenergizing itself and fortify digital transformation by contributing to business growth, innovation, or customer experience optimization. Nowadays, organizations across vertical sectors are highly technologically evolved and think they are in the business of information management. Thus, keeping up with digital/technology developments around them become key drivers for accelerating performance and leading digital transformation.

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The Monthly “Performance Master’ Book Tuning: Measure Things Matter to Drive Digital Transformation Apr. 2019

Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they often only focus on single dimensional behavior performance.

Corporate Performance Management is a management control from strategy to the shop floor. "If you can't measure, you can't manage," legendary management guru Peter Drucker once asserted. Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions to ensure it happens. It takes multifaceted approaches from multidimensional perspectives to unlock digital performance and catalyze change.

 

    

Measure Things Matter to Drive Digital Transformation  

The Performance Dashboard of Digital TransformationForward-looking organizations across industrial sectors are on the journey of digital transformation. You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it. A well-designed dashboard is an effective management tool for enabling business leaders to make better decisions and lead change in the right direction. A well-designed digital management dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance. A digital performance dashboard helps capture the progress being made or the important issues need to be taken care of, with the goal to improve management effectiveness.

How to Set Performance Indicators to Measure Return on Digital Transformation? Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is increasing. The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves, but it is the thorny journey with many bumps and curves on the way. How do you measure return on digital transformation in order to make the timely adjustment and improve its success rate? A well-defined set of measurement for digital transformation should contain a good mix of outcome measures or the long-term strategic value along with performance drivers to track the progress in the short term (operational measures).

Three Dimensional Performance Measurement Hyper-connectivity and interdependence are the digital characteristics, it is important to understand that digital business development and transformation is the paradigm shift which takes multi-viewpoints, multi-discipline, and multi-stage approach. Strategy management, Change Management and performance management need to walk hand-in-hand. Most organizations fail to manage performance effectively because they often only focus on single dimensional behavior performance. In practice, performance assessment is a combination of many factors and shouldn't be quantified so easily. Performance Management is a multidimensional management discipline. Mindsets, behavior, and outcome are all important elements of performance evaluation. Here is the three-dimensional performance measurement.

Measure Things Matter to Drive IT Digital Transformation Forward-thinking IT organizations reach the inflection point of digital transformation. A strategic inflection point is a time when the business fundamentals such as people, process, technology, or cultures are about to change with accelerated speed. A measurement system is a necessary foundation for continuous improvement. CIOs need to understand how to measure IT performance with the right reasons, identify the right measurement and measure them in the right way to drive IT transformation smoothly.

The Promises and Perils of Measuring Changes Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is accelerating! For digital organizations today, Change Management is an ongoing capability, not just a one-time initiative. If you could only manage what you measure, can you make an assessment of your "Changeability," what are the promises and perils of change measurement, and how to improve the success rate of Organizational Change Management?

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The Boardroom's Feedback Feedforward Practices

 Feedback helps to not only act but aid to feedforward for either managing change or accelerating performance. 

Digital has the “VUCA” characteristics - velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It implies both business opportunities and risks on the way and change is a new normal. Corporate Board as a high-level governance body plays a crucial role in business advising and monitoring, as well as setting key tones in leadership exemplification and talent development. To overcome the challenges, boards need to develop their own set of digital best and next practice to improve both the organizational performance and their own performance. Here are three aspects of boardroom feedback and feedforward practices.

Identify the feedback gap: Feedback is about how to improve performance; it is always about the future to keep it relevant. The board directorship and leadership need to be future-oriented with navigation competency. Good feedback helps the board improve leadership effectiveness and governance maturity. Boards must set an example of leadership which permeates through the entire organization. The feedback gaps at the board level are possibly caused by a homogeneous team setting, conventional wisdom, or outdated ‘Best Practices.” When people are too “fit in,” think the same and act the same, without challenging each other’s point of view; make the compromise to be the “team player,” or get stuck at the comfort zone, it’s no surprise that the feedback gaps are enlarged, The feedback gaps can only be closed when the board environment is diverse, dynamic, energetic, and innovative. Boards must set an example of leadership which permeates through the entire organization. There is an integration of thinking, people enjoy the creative tension and constructive feedback. Board directors are skeptical, inquisitive, creative; and apply real critical thinking to practice the board's governance duty effectively. Accountability and oversight are all part of the game changes that boards must address, helps the board directors improve leadership effectiveness.

The BoD’s feedback helps to pull management out of the trees to see the forest: Effective boards advise and get al fundamentals right. The BoDs as the business critic need to provide excellent feedback which gives the top management accurate information to improve; great questions to self-aware; and keen insight to gain an in-depth understanding of the digital ecosystem. Not to have critics might make your job easy, but it compromises the board leadership effectiveness. From a business governance perspective, lack of effective feedback management will create barriers to improving organizational maturity. Leadership is the system in vision and wrapped in a culture of openness and emergence. Most board directors are top seasoned business leaders with decades of experiences or deep functional expertise, independent board directors are also the “outliers” who can provide fresh perspectives and share the unique insight. Thus, their feedback - the information gained from their experiences can help business management gain “lesson learned,” and develop the next digital practices. The feedback is not limited and static. There is the mechanism to collect feedback and there is transparency in the follow-up. It’s an expansive and dynamic cycle of continuous feedback, exploration, experience and a more natural process of improvement.

Feedback-feedforward practices are important to improve board effectiveness: In most organizations, leaders are extremely calculated in terms of feedforward strategy because of its unpredictability. What has passed can easily be evaluated but what will and should happen in the future? Feedback is information that enables you to improve. It is essential that you get the information and take actions on it. Feedback does not focus on the past - it tells you what is happening so that you can adapt. Feedback helps to not only act but aid to feedforward for either managing change or accelerating performance. Feedforward cannot be seen in isolation. Multiple ideas need to be taken, and a cohesive plan needs to be built. The feedback forms have to be creative as to focus on both past performance and future goals or changes to achieve the required goals. We need not to forget our past, but we should learn from it and move forward. In this sense, feedback is relevant. It needs to be continuous, as close to real time as possible, in control of the recipient and in a way the recipient can understand. The board feedback on business performance and outcomes help the business management make the timely adjustment for making continuous improvement and maximizing their potential.

Corporate governance is to make sure that management is doing its job properly. The real BoD's dilemma is that driving the business forward is extremely difficult. It means looking into an unknown future and attempting to define the landscape with its risks and opportunities. Eventually, feedback should always be genuinely proper, precise, and substantive, it is a solution to the problem of cluelessness. Thus, feedback-feedforward practices are important to improve leadership effectiveness and governance maturity.

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Running IT as Innovative Achiever

Running IT as an innovative achiever is all about doing things better, differentiate yourself from competitions, run, grow and transform the business harmoniously.

Businesses today face numerous challenges, fiery competitions and rapid changes either technologically or economically. Companies across the industrial sector are on the journey of significant transformation. Many IT organizations are at the crossroad to either reinvent themselves or become irrelevant. Every forward-thinking CIO needs to ask themselves and others: Shall we continually be operated as a support center or become a business differentiator? Do we have a harmonized vision about overall IT competency and organizational maturity? Which role should or can IT play in the digital organization to keep it relevant and lift up the organization to the next growth cycle and accelerate business performance?

Tap unique leverage: Each functional unit can bring a unique perspective and a set of business competencies to the table. It should start at the strategic level, IT, marketing, finance, HR., etc, all have its own subsection of the overall business strategy. But what the part of the value IT can offer is a way of looking at things that are analytical, dynamic, or structural from a holistic angle, because IT is in a unique position to oversee businesses processes and architectures. There are times when IT will be the only party in the room with multidimensional business views. IT needs to apply the enriched knowledge and experiences to identify opportunities, promote advanced technological platforms or tools, and lead business transformation proactively. Organizations today have to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, and exponential growth of information on the daily based. It is invaluable for both business and IT to know what’s going on in each other’s space and why; they must rely on their strengths to build relevant business capacity and core organizational competencies. Digital CIOs need to capture business insight and develop all necessary leadership skillsets, to understand the company’s business model, go to market approach, and business vision to enable the strategy execution with business solution deliverable. IT will be more productive, innovative, and influential if putting the focus on achieving operational excellence, tapping unique leverage, providing great products or services, and collaborating with the business to become customer-centric and solve their problems creatively.

Enforce personalization: With unprecedented convenience brought by lightweight technologies and abundant information, the digital organization is more like the living thing with its unique identity, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to become more flexible than the siloed industrial age. Great personalization leads to a better understanding by designing tailored applications or solutions to delight customers. It requires IT leaders and staff to work closely with the business and take a systematic view of framing the right problems and providing tailored solutions. With continuous disruptions often caused by technologies, the businesses are looking to IT for leadership around the competitive application of information & technology in a rapidly changing market. The new normal of running a customer-centric organization is to provide personalized products or services to customers and improve their purchasing experience with the company. To run IT as an innovative achiever, both prioritization and personalization are important. In general, careful considerations must be made about which knowledge or skills have to be secured; what are commoditized services and what are competitive differentiators; what services can be purchased outside; and which capability should be built in-house. Talented IT staffs are not only technical specialists but rather of business gurus, who also happen to be technically proficient, they can understand real business problems and investigate innovative solutions diligently.

Channel creative energy: While the individual contributions provide the 'building block" of creativity, the horizon of creativity is expanded by manifesting creativity from an individual endeavor to a team activity and collective effort. Creativity can manifest in a collective environment. It is the synchronization of their individual inputs to make something that no single individual could achieve alone. The collective creativity can revitalize the organizational culture and catalyze innovation. In the business environment, being innovative is a state of mind. You have to live it and breathe it every day, otherwise, you would feel stuck and the business will get stale. Highly creative people in the team or across the teams brainstorm, collaborate, clarify, develop on each other's ideas, discover nuances and channel creative energy. Innovation will happen when people are not limited by overly rigid rules or structures; they are given free space to be creative without bureaucratic management discipline to hold them back; they are encouraged to think differently, experiment with new ways to do things and have the right dose of risk appetite and a positive attitude to fail forward.

IT has a great opportunity to catalyze innovation and lead the digital transformation. Innovation is not just about technology or equal to the latest gadget. It’s about people, culture, partnership, and manners, etc. CIOs need to be creative enough to think out-of-the-box for embracing great ideas; and logical enough to plan, engineer and follow through. Running IT as an innovative achiever is all about doing things better, differentiate yourself from competitions, run, grow and transform the business harmoniously.

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