Innovative-Insight

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

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7600+ blog postings in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. 

The “Digital Master” book series includes 28 books to share insight from the multidimensional digital lens and perceive the multi-faceted impact the digital era upon us is making to businesses and society. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Here is the weekly insight of digital leadership, IT Management, and Talent Management.

Inherence Modern corporate boards play a critical role to exemplify digital leadership and influence corporate culture. Consider digital organization as the coherent, hyper-connected and interlaced ecosystem, governance is a process for a group of people governing with a set of principles and practices. Corporate boards make ultimate decisions and they should really focus on organizing the corporate assets toward the achievement of the business vision and mission.

Innovation-on-innovation Digital board directors not only need to be forward-thinking, but they also have to be further looking, think longer term, guide the executive team in the right direction. A corporate board of directors' duty to shareholders encompasses the need to effectively manage stakeholder issues and values so they do not become a risk to shareholder values. And shareholder values do not begin and end with financial profit. Smart corporations and shareholders...

InterdisciplinaryProblemPrevention Preventing problems is superior to fixing problems for us to step into the future confidently, understand talent with empathy and change the world effortlessly.A "problem" is an opportunity waiting to happen. There are criteria that characterize good and bad statements of problems and opportunities. Any progressive change is technically a sort of opportunity management and problem-solving scenario.

Inclusiveness Employee Inclusion = Engagement, Innovation, Retention, Loyalty, and Productivity. From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the 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 brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

Intelligence & Influence Leadership is the ability to influence with or without authority. The power of influence has many dimensions and depends on a number of factors. Leadership is complex yet simple: Complex in that there are so many traits and characteristics that are considered when evaluating a leader. Simplicity in that the substance of leadership never changes, it’s all about the future and change; direction and dedication; influence and innovation.

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

Read More

Thoughts & Quotes of "Unimaginable"

Digital transformation stories become self-sustaining narratives. Everyone understands it, knows what it takes to get there, knows what endangers the journey. Holds one another accountable. Collectively, the business steps into the future of business and creates an unimaginable digital landscape.

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

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


As a matter of fact, a digital organization can only achieve high performance and unimaginable digital breakthroughs by taking the collaboration road.

Anthropology helps to open one’s eyes and discover the unimaginable and fascinating things that human beings have done. It can give you a positive outlook on the world and the idea that human beings are really amazing creatures.

Digital transformation stories become self-sustaining narratives. Everyone understands it, knows what it takes to get there, knows what endangers the journey. Holds one another accountable. Collectively, the business steps into the future of business and creates an unimaginable digital landscape.


The success of innovation management starts with effective communication. If you can get the IT leaders and staff to engage in open dialog with the business people, sharing ideas and learning, you can generate lots of fresh ideas and accomplish unimaginable things.

The framework is a structure, like a chest of drawers metaphorically: You can open drawers, put things in and take things out. In some drawers, you will find some unimaginable stuff, in others, some old crap. Some drawers are empty and some of the content should be replaced.

Make sure that your company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in across the geographical location and you have a methodological digital platform that allows you to manage them in a structural way. Get all these steps right, digital leadership is doing unimaginable work for developing a world-class organization with a strong culture of creativity and solid innovation competency.

Read More

Priorities & Weaknesses of Strategy

With continuous disruptions and continuous changes, it’s important to encourage people to be more effective and creative, to come up with better ideas, identify strengths and weaknesses, set the right priority, accelerate performance and unlock changes.

Today’s organizations are like the organic systems that keep evolving. They have different functions, structures, layers and systems, and their relationships are nonlinear and interdependent. To run a holistic business, it is important to involve not only putting different pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

 Top management needs to set good policies, guidelines, structures, and methods to drive expected changes, identify priorities & weaknesses in a variety of management and governance disciplines, catalyze innovation and improve the overall organizational maturity.

Identify priorities & weaknesses in strategy formulation: The digital world is complex and uncertain, the world boundaries close in, the business weaknesses and strengths are inseparable, opportunities are tightly mingled with threats and vice versa. Thus, business management needs to take a hard look at what's going on inside the organization as well as its ecosystem environment, including business strengths and weaknesses - analyze Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities Threats in their digital environment by doing “SWOT analysis. Today’s business strategy management is not composed of linear steps, but an iterative and dynamic continuum. Strengths and weaknesses need an evaluation in order to have a decision-making ground.

Nowadays there are lots of things happening in the company, and there are many distractions and pitfalls on the way. Prioritization is critical, as the alternative is a land grab for resources. Without effective prioritization skills, resource or talent gaps only enlarge, the business performance suffers, and further leads to business incoherence. Prioritization helps to focus the strategic concerns of the organization, and formulate a good strategy. It is important to prioritize things, make use of clear targets, communicate and facilitate discussions and ensure management for understanding the various trade-offs. Technically, strategy management with an embedded prioritization mechanism is important for selecting, scoping, and aligning specific business initiatives to overall strategic objectives and budgets.

Identify strength & weaknesses, the variety of curves in management (including strategic, tactical and operational): Digital makes an impact on the speed to run a dynamic business, the empathy to their people, the prioritization skills to get important things done, and the orchestration of their capability in high mature digital organizations. The challenge of digital management is to identify strengths and weaknesses in strategy implementation and manage the tactics with efficiency. From a digital management perspective, they need to check: Where is the organization on the technology or process adoption curve? Learning curve, change curve, technology adoption curve? Is the organization a pioneer, mature adapter, or laggard? What are the risks in taking strategic initiatives? How much risk are you personally willing to take? Etc.

Running a business is a progressive change continuum. It’s important to identify strengths & weaknesses, the variety of curves in management (including strategic, tactical and operational). The change curve is a model of the states that people who are to change will go through. It is applicable to everyone, even those who planned and conceived the vision. Change awareness helps to understand how change capabilities are underpinned by change processes, people, and technology, and how much change capabilities are really required for the change effort you are kicking off. Transformational change needs resolute leadership, the premise behind this is more than simply obtaining senior buy-in. This is needed to support a cultural change through the change life cycle which enables everyone, wherever they are in that cycle, to accept the direction and focus on benefits realization.

Identify priorities & weaknesses in governance: Governance is about how well an organization is being run and if set upright, it should effectively oversee the achievement of the vision, strategy, and objectives. It is an internal control to monitor the path of strategy execution. A Governance Model is an architectural description that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders who want to ensure that the strategy execution is aligned with intent.

The management and governance are like hand in glove. Technically, the governance structure is independent of management structure, but the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into the business process seamlessly. Given many organizations don't view governance as "decision-making optimization," “performance monitoring,” or “accountability enforcement,” their governance efforts usually devolve into time-consuming, costly, bureaucratic constructs. Prioritization in governance discipline is a sort of “balance” skill, to know when to take the gas pedal to accelerate speed and when to take the brake to control the risks.

The business world has shifted from the industrial age to the information age to the knowledge and creativity economy. The fundamental concept of management is still the same. But with continuous disruptions and continuous changes, it’s important to encourage people to be more effective and creative, to come up with better ideas, identify strengths and weaknesses, set the right priority, accelerate performance and unlock changes.

Read More

Insight of "Digital Boardroom": "Innovative-corporate"BoD"

The board’s innovation management oversight helps to de-risk the introduction of innovation into the marketplace and tie innovations and the innovative culture to the organization's strategy.

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

Innovative BoD

Innovation & Influence Every board is unique, with its own strength and focus. A distinctive board can stand out as the mastermind behind digitalization and lead innovation effortlessly.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...

Inherence Modern corporate boards play a critical role to exemplify digital leadership and influence corporate culture.Consider digital organization as the coherent, hyper-connected and interlaced ecosystem, governance is a process for a group of people governing with a set of principles and practices. Corporate boards make ultimate decisions and they should really focus on organizing the corporate assets toward the achievement of the business vision and mission.

Innovative An innovative Board set a Tone for Culture of Innovation. There are different types of boards around, some Boards are "working Boards" and have to provide hands-on advice, information, and oversight; other Boards have a more strategic purpose in advising the corporate oversight. Many Boards are often stuck with a view of the rear mirror mindset, looking at the past quarter results, supervising the audit, and reviewing a budget of the coming..

Unconventional 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.

Innovation-Gaps The board’s innovation management oversight helps to de-risk the introduction of innovation into the marketplace and tie innovations and the innovative culture to the organization's strategy. 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 “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 5 million page views with 7600+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.



The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Slideshare Presentation


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Amazon Order Link


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" B& N Order Link


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" IBook Order Link


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Lulu Order Link


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Introduction


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter 1 Introduction: The Digital Board's Composition Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter II Introduction: The Digital Board's Digital Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As": Chapter III Introduction: The Digital Board's Strategy Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter IV Introduction: The Digital Board's IT Inquiries


The "Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As" Chapter V Introduction: The Digital Board's Leadership Inquiries

Read More

Governance on Governance of BoD

Digital board directors not only need to be forward-thinking, but they also have to be further looking, think longer term, guide the executive team in the right direction. 

A corporate board of directors' duty to shareholders encompasses the need to effectively manage stakeholder issues and values so they do not become a risk to shareholder values. And shareholder values do not begin and end with financial profit. Smart corporations and shareholders know that focusing only on short-term economics can lead to negative values that may outweigh finances in the long-term. 

Corporate boards as the governance body need to oversee significant issues of the business. Governance is a sophisticated process that if well executed, will lead the business to reach the next level of business maturity.

Innovation-on-innovation: Corporate boards oversee business strategies which includes innovation strategy as an integral component. A comprehensive innovation strategy is a requirement to value-driven innovation by creating a clear line of sight between the enterprise vision and how to build a balanced portfolio with mixed breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation, hard innovation and soft innovation. A good innovation strategy allows you a number of things such as identifying interconnections and interdependencies, understanding flows or the lack of them, spotting business opportunities or risks, prioritizing and making choices, taking actions or formulating creative or unconventional solutions to solve problems. So the corporate board’s strategic oversight directly impacts on the innovation effectiveness and maturity.

Their “innovation on innovation” efforts include such as scrutinizing the principles & practices of innovation management, reviewing business investment scenarios which can dramatically and positively distinguish the success of the organization for decades to come, etc. What should the innovation effort focus on - defending the core, penetrating the adjacencies, or entering the white space and how the resources will be balanced across these domains? How can the company make it work - through internal development or organic growth? Etc.

The innovation-driven organization with the strategic corporate board oversight can open up opportunities and identify risks, hold all innovation initiatives and deploy a range of different management methodologies and technologies and tailor their own circumstances for developing the fitting innovation models. It also continues to develop the best and next innovation practices involving streamlining idea flow, providing anchors to explore possibilities, making good policies to encourage idea-sharing, developing sourcing practices, and scale up.

Information on information: In the digital age with exponential growth of information, any business can be at risk for survival at any minute due to continuous digital disruptions and “VUCA” digital new normal. Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent. In fact, information quality directly decides the quality of decision as well as the maturity of the organizational management. Better information allows leaders at all levels to understand where they stand and what is required as a team to enhance business operations in lieu of the remaining status quo. Instead of being fed by management with certain information of their work, BoDs need to feel more comfortable swimming in the information ocean and capturing unique insight to guide their organization through a change journey.

Also, to improve the governance maturity, corporate boards need to oversee information strategy and evaluate the effectiveness of information management. The corporate board’s information capital oversight helps business shareholders feel more comfortable with continually investing in these “soft assets” by enforcing information integrity, availability, and confidentiality. A good information strategy is important to help prioritize based on the business needs, communicate extensively, set guidelines, enable executives to make information-based decisions and build up an analytics-driven culture to improve organizational decision maturity.

Governance on governance: The corporate board oversees risk/governance. Corporate governance helps to manage collaborative business results and best practices that view the organizational objectives holistically with the correct strategy lenses/focus. A good governance standard provides a common corporate "language" and work instructions to decide and take actions for either grasping opportunities or managing risks. The rule of thumb is that: Good governance must create excellent performance, especially for long-term business growth. Without effective GRC discipline, the business will face significant risk for surviving, and opportunities which it creates cannot be properly transferred into multidimensional business value. Every organization has a set of governance rules, processes, and practices. With increasing pace of changes, some of them are perhaps outdated and stifle innovation. Thus, governance on the board level involves updating rules, optimizing processes, or developing/scaling new governance practices, etc.

Fundamentally a board has two responsibilities: Deciding what the expectations of management are and deciding whether management is achieving expectations. Good governance must create excellent performance, especially for long-term business growth. For all companies, the definition of the roles, and drivers to the corporate boards and committees are essential to lead and to maintain a productive relationship with the executives. The point is how to effectively influence, not command & control. Different organizations have their own leadership structures and strengths. The effective corporate board needs to assess practicality via skiing a set of questions: What is the vision & mission we intend to accomplish? What would be the most effective leadership structure for accomplishing that? What structure would ensure the organization's leaders are actively ensuring the organization is walking the talk of its values? What structures would ensure the leaders can actively connect with others who are seeking to accomplish the same goals? What structures would ensure active leadership in developing and monitoring programs to accomplish the mission? Etc.

Digital board directors not only need to be forward-thinking, but they also have to be further looking, think longer term, guide the executive team in the right direction. The classic linear management practices based on reductionist logic are simply not sufficient to manage the nonlinear digital businesses decision-making optimization. The effective governance disciplines should complement business management practice in order to navigate transformation confidently and drive changes effortlessly. The directorship in any organization must be able to make influence from mindset to behavior and evolve to what is needed next for radical changes, and steer the organization in the right direction. 

Read More

Objective Assessment of Capability Maturity

Often, capability cannot be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning, unique culture ingredients or management expertise that the organization goes with.

The characteristics of digital businesses are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Business capabilities are what abilities or competencies an organization has or need and they are the resources required for achieving a certain mission or purpose of the business. 

Usually, the functioning organizations have a set of capabilities that enable it to achieve successful outcomes, whether financial, brand, or double bottom line. How to apply a business capability view to identify, map, build, improve capabilities, and integrate differentiated and dynamic business capabilities into multiple competencies, make the close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, and accelerate performance?

Strategic capability mapping helps to visualize the end to end enterprise and bridge the “gap of opportunity” between where you are and want to become: Capabilities continue being considered the market-relevant bundles of resources with the potential to drive competitiveness. The organization’s competency is based on a set of cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. Processes underpin capabilities and capabilities underpin strategies. Capability can be mapped to the processes that instantiate the capability, the technology used, the information required or the talent involved. A structural capability mapping and development approach enable the strategic responsiveness of the company and improve organizational competency.

More often than not, capabilities are interdependent, so when you want to make a change to one of those capabilities, then your capability mapping and modeling help you understand relationships or dependencies, assists with a high-level impact assessment and delivery approach. Organizations have different roles and hierarchical structure, the capability view can leverage different perspectives from different roles, and question whether and how a business capability perspective adds value over the perspectives that they are accustomed to using and executes capability-based strategy smoothly. Capability mapping also helps the organization set the right priorities, bridge a multitude of gaps (resources, talent, processes) to improve their differentiated competency.

Capabilities move from base or competitive level to differentiated level: Every organization has a set of capabilities. The capability is the ability to perform a set of activities and achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions through combinations of ways and means (activities and resources). There are base capabilities to keep the business light on. There are “me too” type competitive necessaries to catch market share or scale up the business, there are also competitive differentiators that make the organization stand out as a leader due to the unique strength they build up.

Organizational capabilities have business outcomes; they collaborate with each other and are enabled by interrelated processes, services, functions, interfaces, resources in organization. Capabilities moving from base or competitive level to differentiated level happens when an organization decides to differentiate by taking an existing capability to the next level, or integrating different capabilities into unique business competencies. Capabilities evolve and move between categories based on the technology evolution, business driver, business model evolution etc. Forethoughtful organizations keep developing core competencies based on multilayered and integral business capabilities to gain the first mover advantage or sustain their leading position.

Capabilities move from fixed to dynamic, transactional to transformational: Business capabilities are fundamental pillars to achieve the corporate strategy. Due to fast paced change, digital capabilities are dynamic and recombinant by nature, without them, strategy execution cannot be sustained. Dynamic Capabilities are the organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, etc. They are more complex in design, requiring cross-functional collaboration, embedding agility into processes for adapting to changes, and shortening the delivery cycles. And they are firm-specific resources/assets that are difficult if not impossible to imitate. Resource is an important building block of dynamic capability; the dynamic capability will further build the organization’s strengths in core areas and differentiated competency.

We can also categorize capability as transactional or transformational. Transactional capabilities keep the light on, transformational capability creates something new out of something old, reaching the new horizon out of an old vision and making a leap of business to the next level of growth. They also evoke fundamental evolutions in the basic political and cultural systems of the organization for achieving the high -performance business results.

Often, capability cannot be transferred because of the degree of organizational learning, unique culture ingredients or management expertise that the organization goes with. It is important to identify the key business capability and make an objective assessment of capability maturity, also hone them into organization-wide competency, making deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities, and most or all of its products and services, to execute capability-based strategy.

Read More

Variety of Business Intelligence

With high velocity and continuous disruptions, business executives are sensitive to emergent trends, pay close attention to the opportunities and risks on the way.

Business Intelligence refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing one of the most invaluable organizational assets-data, to achieve business value. It's critical for the company to share that information among its primary stakeholders, to make business intelligence more “visible” for them to run a smart business. 

So applying the variety of business intelligence to problem solving is goal-directed and purposeful, and all intelligent activities are planned to reach well defined goals and drive business forward smoothly.

Process intelligence: Process Intelligence is the information that is extracted from a process about the process; throughput times, bottlenecks etc. It can also mean process governance –the process to manage processes, such as risk control, compliance, monitoring, etc. A business process is "smart" when it accommodates controlled excursions away from what would otherwise be a rigid sequence of steps. The smart process needs to have dynamic aspects to it. It is rigorous; it can handle ad-hoc and exceptional matters smoothly and it ‘knows’ enough to be able to handle failures effectively. The process oriented perspective enables the business management to make continuous improvement such as system optimization, process streamlining, or cost optimization, etc.

Processes underpin business capabilities, capabilities underpin business strategy. At the business scope, you create a system around the process, call it a management system which becomes a vehicle for strategy execution. Smart business processes should actually be born out of a strategy, such as a process for customer services, when applied strategically saves much cost, allowing you to become more competitive to achieve business goals. Processes can be designed, approved, documented, and owned, but almost always require some combination of physical, data, resource/people assets, measurement and monitoring systems, management systems, and coordination systems to truly become capabilities that organizations can deploy, manage, and attenuate/amplify against demand variety as needed.

Customer intelligence: Organizations with high dig IQ have a clear understanding of how customer-centric approaches enhance the business model and extend profitability. In order to run a customer centric business, make information available and useful, exert lots of intelligence to capture customer insight and business foresight. Approaches to building business intelligence upon customers tend to look at the past behavior of individuals to try to determine the segments that they belong to and forecast future behavior.

People centric organizations will attract happier customers, everything from how pricing is affecting close times and support calls to referral business activity triggered by high customer satisfaction, etc. The information based Decision Management manages customer treatment decisions as corporate assets and each customer decision is considered individually. These decision assets are identified, modeled, enhanced by analytics and business know-how, checked for compliance, evaluated for risk and delivered to the multi-channel business systems in a structural way.

Competitive intelligence: The business intends to understand where their competitors are getting a negative sentiment. Social analytics enables the business to track competitors on social media and understand how competitors are leveraging social platforms for monitoring brand sentiment or customer engagement. It goes beyond understanding what is being said to understanding who is saying it, what are their influence networks and where it is being said. It helps to develop a strong brand, improve effective communication and collaborative innovation.

Digital workforce today is more informative, flexible, and virtual in the hyperconnected digital world. Organizations use social platforms and collaboration tools to communicate, learn, and grow, engaging diverse and intellect minds in brainstorming and co-solving problems. Showing the value internally of proactive information-driven analytics can help to build a case for performing it, build differential business capability, and improve organizational maturity systematically.

With high velocity and continuous disruptions, business executives are sensitive to emergent trends, pay close attention to the opportunities and risks on the way. To survive and thrive around the multi-faceted business world, it's important to apply the variety of information based analytics and to decode complexity and improve overall business maturity.

Read More

Who are your Innovative Culturist

What a Change Agent most often does is to harness the skills, talent, drive, passion and enthusiasm for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal for reaching the next level of business transformation.

Businesses are like the switches connecting to the ever-expanding and dynamic digital ecosystem. Culture is collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. In today's work environment, it takes a lot of energy to break old habits and outdated thought processes, rejuvenate the workplace, innovative culture and drive digital transformation. Innovative culturists are in demand to assist in designing and reshaping cultures, resolving conflicts, and pulling the right strings to make changes go smoothly and inspire people to achieve high performance.

Shape the problem-solving culture: Information is permeating to every corner of the organization and technology is the disruptive force of many transformative changes. Technically, running today’s complex business means you need to solve large and small business problems systematically. Therefore, business leaders and professionals must proactively participate in their vision, shape a problem-solving culture and build differentiated competencies. They need to become problem framer as in many companies that get stuck at the low level of business maturity, people continue to fix symptoms while the real problems keep coming back. A solution is useless if the problem is not perceived and the root cause is not scrutinized in the right way.

In practice, business leaders need to have digital acumen, cross disciplinary expertise, develop a desired culture and shape the future of organization via integrating hard business elements such as people, process, technology, and soft elements such as leadership, communication seamlessly. They need to become far, far more business focused and digital literate in order to be the digital shaper who can create the business synergy and accelerate performance.

Shape the future of the work: The spirit comes from the top, the digital leaders are the big shaper of organizational culture by setting principles or guidelines, grounding rules, and making policies to shape the future or work. The followers imitate their leaders. If they espouse and exhibit certain characteristics, and then it will be picked up by other members of the organization. So collaboratively, top leaders focus on solving problems at strategic level and middle management and front liners solve problems at the tactical level.

To maintain a positive environment, a set of guiding principles can be written on a page. It will be supported by the bulk of employees in defining the boundaries they also wish to maintain. Good policies encourage a positive culture, empower talent, nurture creativity and shape the future of the work to enforce trust and respect that cascades from the top to the bottom, develop the people-centric working environment, and unleash collective business potential to solve problems consistently.

Shape a hyper-connected digital ecosystem: The emerging business world upon us is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. There is an intimate interplay spectrum across the living digital system out there. Leading organizations are proactively planning, evolving, and co-creating in the dynamic business ecosystem, business leaders and professionals as a culture shaper treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents, to develop a culture of creativity and build a people centric business.

In leading companies, the ecosystem perspective as the digital shaper allows the organization to explore innovation in all directions; the technical structure expands to include all aspects of digital management disciplines; grow the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional lens technologically, sociologically, psychologically, and anthropologically; for those lagging organizations, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. The real challenge is to understand the dynamic business reality, where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect and scale up across the digital ecosystem effortlessly.

Culture is invisible and powerful, change is happening at a more rapid pace. You cannot steer the business in a right direction without a clear vision and you cannot shape a high performance culture without passion and motivation. What a Change Agent most often does is to harness the skills, talent, drive, passion and enthusiasm for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal for reaching the next level of business transformation.

Read More

Intuitive & Informative Decision-Making

Decision making in the “VUCA” new normal is often challenging, there are many flavors of decision-making, there are different types of decision makers, and there are many ingredients in decision-making formulas.

Decision making is both art and science. People rely on their gut if they are trained or experienced, first responses don't have time to weigh all the factors in a decision and are trained to make fast decisions. 

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


Information-based analytics is and never was a magic wand anyway, it is just another way to make an informed decision: The whole purpose of analytics is to make better decisions based on data. Data is like the raw diamond, raw diamonds get their use when becoming treated, processed, and refined into industrial diamonds. Only treatment makes them valuable, able to serve a purpose - help to make more effective decisions to create better business values. Sometimes key data is not available; sometimes intuition does well before they are able to explain the logic; and the other times, you just have to break down the big problems to solve them piece by piece via careful reasoning. Also, information is not the only ingredient in decision-making formulas. "Information" as input to the decision-making does not absolutely determine the decision but allows the decision-maker to exercise their judgment.

Analytics has no value until they inform decisions, getting buy-in to the value of the information being provided, and developing plans to act specifically on that information. Keep in mind, decision-making process is different from 'problem defining' processes. The questions to check: Do you distinguish between decision making and possibly? Or does your decision-making process inherently include a phase for 'problem defining'? Use a more logical decision-making scenario and wonder why the actions we have taken have made the situation worse. Create engagement around insight, enabling scenario and forecasting to promote decision alternatives. You will dramatically open up your options and build your abilities to make effective decisions.

Intuition or gut-feeling helps to make quick decisions, collectively, communication enforcement improves decision power: Besides information, the right dose of gut feeling is the differentiator to make you a great decision maker. The human brain can process huge amounts of information unconsciously without it ever rising into consciousness. If the problem is familiar, and a quick response is needed, intuition works well. They have well-developed heuristic models, etc. that have been trained in similar situations. This is why intuitive decision-making can be powerful and should not be underestimated.

Organizations need to check: Do your leaders have flexibility to make quick decisions and communicate them clearly? Collectively, can you make decisions in a timely manner. Business can only be done on facts and that too objectively assessed while business decision requires imagination power, but the same needs to be validated at repeated intervals. Down to the hierarchy, decision making often lies in informal and closed group power centers within the organization. If you can understand the culture along with an organizational chart, you would often know which lever to use to get the decision approval done, and collectively, how to make team decisions in a timely manner.

Tell-Listen-Adapt communication frame-work helps to bridge the gap between strategic and tactical decision-making: In the decision-making and business planning process, assumptions should be kept to the minimum. If you start with an inter-dependency of shared goals that are directly related to creating value for an organization, you have a great foundation for then working on the process of how to make those goals a reality. In many organizations, typically, one level of leadership communicates with the next level and so on and typically the message is somewhat diluted by the time it reaches the employee responsible for making tactical decisions and doing their job. Thus, employees do not understand their goals in a way that shows how they work with other employees’ goals and the strategic goals of their organization. The "so what" factor can be huge.

Translating strategic intent into meaningful action and making the needed changes stick can be difficult, but a significant step for seamless strategy management. Many times responsibilities/goals are communicated but decision makers in the case of conflicts are not clearly identified and even when they are clear. There tend to be definitely perceivable decision choke points due to the inadequate delegation. Thus, for communicating shared goals and improving decision-maturity, effective communicators are working to spread that throughout the organization in a diverse set of activities with mixed communication styles to improve their decision making skills and problem-solving competency.

Decision making in the “VUCA” new normal is often challenging, there are many flavors of decision-making, there are different types of decision makers, and there are many ingredients in decision-making formulas. Either informative or intuitive, decision-making is the link to bridge present and future, leadership and followership, strategy and execution, information and intelligence, planning-action-results.

Read More

Innovation Index, Alignment, Indicator

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to nourish a culture of creativity and its aptitude to manage innovation. 

Innovations in the digital era are coming at a seemingly much fast pace, more data, more changes, and more potential disruptions, and therefore, innovation management also becomes more complex and volatile, and often a multi-disciplinary effort. Innovation happens when you change the game or you bring the different twist to what is currently perceived or established. There are breakthrough innovations and incremental innovations. It's natural to fear the unknown or be skeptical of the unproven. A truly innovative "story of the future" can literally revolutionize a culture which is the collective minds and habits, align innovation processes, select innovation indicators and improve innovation success rate.

Innovation culture index actually measures the ability of people to be innovative: The art of innovation is that it involves new ways of bringing together ideas and resources to create something novel and generate value. Changing the culture is the mindset, if you want an innovative culture, it’s important to empower innovators, hire, retain, and recognize innovators who can help the organization shape the culture of creativity and develop an open and optimal environment for innovation.

Innovation culture index actually measures the ability of people to be innovative. Who can come up with the new ideas? Then, who can implement them? Who will embrace change, who will fight it? Top talent with interdisciplinary knowledge and the right dose of “gut feeling” supported by good logic enables them to capture the flash of ideas or unique insight, learn to "think differently," think positively, think fun, or think beyond their reach. “Innovative culture influencers” should encourage out of the box thinking, have vision and leadership competency to stimulate creative energy and maximize innovation at all levels in the organization.

Innovation alignments: Innovation can be viewed as consisting of many different stages. Some processes are more structured than others in innovation management. The key elements in systematic innovation include people, strategy, process, tool, and culture, missing any one of them will severely impact the sustainability of intentional innovation management effort. What’s very rigorous and systematic is the analysis of business issues, opportunities, or marketing dilemmas, etc. Innovation alignment means you have to understand business problems thoroughly, enforce cross-boundary communication, deal with business conflicts, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements such as people, process, and technology, and update structures, methodologies, and cultures to improve decision effectiveness.

Businesses fail at innovation execution because they have no clear processes, nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally. The main barriers to innovation are silo, rigidity, inflexibility or bureaucracy, etc. It actually needs to break down outdated rules or inflexible processes and take a systematic approach with robust processes to management innovation.

Innovation alignment requires continuous business optimization through a serious amount of positive communication whilst continuously looking for dynamic processes, tightening coordination and collaboration with business partners. Innovation process could be very loose on purpose. It takes systematic effort within a company to embrace fresh thinking, leverage powerful digital information technologies, cultivate an innovative culture, and manage innovation in a structural way.

Innovation indicator: Historically, performance measurement systems for most businesses have been financing driven and often stifles innovation. Not every improvement effort is innovation, but innovation should always be sort of improvement. There are leading indicators and lagging indicators for innovation management. For example, measuring the contributing value of your new products or innovations as either revenue or preferably profit to your overall value. Some factors that could be used to measure innovation score within a company could be human and financial resources invested, employees motivation with top management encouragement and support, challenging activities being involved, level of autonomy, number of innovation initiatives being launched, % of new product/service contribution to total value, capacity/potential to innovate, or the level of past innovation performance measures, etc.

The goal is to show how the pieces of measurement data directly or indirectly affect business productivity, performance, and profitability. Incomplete assessment of measurement variables would mislead the management making ineffective decisions or focus on short-term business results only. Irrelevant measurement indicators will waste time, add the other layer of management complexity, and decrease the business effectiveness.

The good or bad innovation would depend on the business’s attitude to nourish a culture of creativity and its aptitude to manage innovation. Because the evolution of innovation only exists in a more open environment or ecosystem that creates unique insight, take advantage of all sources of creativity in a more open way and manage a balanced innovation portfolio with a right mix of incremental innovations and breakthrough innovations. At the level of innovation maturity, different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes, helping the organization adapt, improve, grow, and integrate, develop a healthy innovation portfolio with both breakthrough and incremental innovation mix and nurture an ever-evolving innovation system effectively.

Read More

Keyword Summary: Inclusiveness

Employee Inclusion = Engagement, Innovation, Retention, Loyalty, and Productivity.

From one generation to the next, the substance of leadership does not change, it’s about the 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 brainstorm the future of digital leadership and business transformation.

     Inclusiveness 

Inclusive-leader An inclusive leader embraces the full spectrum of cognitive difference and the wealth of human abilities. In many traditional multinational organizations, there is often a diversity agenda with good intention to make equal opportunities. However, sometimes it leads to further divides. The prefix ‘div’ seems to have a negative connotation associated with the words such as division, divide, divergent. By focusing only on what makes people different...

Inclusiveness The business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle. Contemporary organizations are diversified with a multigenerational, multicultural workforce using multidevice to do multitasking. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are additive to one another.

Inclusion-as-Strategy Employee Inclusion = Engagement, Innovation, Retention, Loyalty, and Productivity. Inclusion starts with a thought process, a mind, besides the conventional understanding of diversity -gender, race, age, etc., inclusiveness nowadays is more about how to embrace the cognitive difference, the color of character, or diversity of viewpoints. It needs to become the key ingredient of corporate culture; Further, it should be viewed as a company-wide strategy....

Innovation vs. Inclusiveness Do not just think that diversity is only based on how people look, in fact, the diversity of thought is the gem of creativity. Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is inspiration, inclusiveness, encouragement, and abundance of knowledge. Innovation is then the management discipline to transform those novel ideas and achieve their business value.

Innovator & Includers Creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is inspiration, inclusiveness, encouragement, and abundance of knowledge.Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations...

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

Read More

"Inferential" Leadership

Leadership is induction & deduction; principle & discipline, methodology & practice.

The “VUCA” new normal today acknowledges that we can never know about an issue or a business completely or predict every turn or curve precisely. Digital leaders need to look beyond what might be the known facts to consider and what’s not known, become more future oriented, have strong logic and depth of insight to handle many situations, adapt to emerging changes and respond to unpredictable circumstances relentlessly.

Digital leaders need to understand “patterns” defined as “solutions of problems in a context”: The digital organization is a hyperconnected and interdependent system. System = Pattern. The digital leaders today need to be the systems thinkers who can recognize pattern language as running a business today is an iterative problem-solving continuum. Patterns are a sort of hidden clue, with a body of “descriptions of forces.” More broadly speaking, everything is interconnected with hidden logic as a clue, and the earth “thinks” as a giant ecosystem. An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment. The leaders’ systematic logic helps them dig through the root cause and solve problems holistically.

Digital organizations are ecological systems which keep evolving. There are all sorts of gaps that need to be closed. There is frustration in the process of leadership. Such frustration may come from an element of dissonance or disagreement between leader and followers, miscommunication or lack of empathy. In practice, many leaders and managers have intentions to lead but lack cognitive understanding, intellectual sophistication, and differential strength to lead effectively. There is agreement in the selected vision, values, purpose and plan. Systems logic seems to be the best route to take to develop viable, long term solutions to a great many of the issues we are facing today.

Highly effective leaders take a logical approach to transform a crowd into a workable collective and even greater -into the fountain of human potential: Leadership is about respecting and understanding of people and driving progressive changes. This is a most elegant, interesting, and challenging art. Leaders or managers need to understand that the linear management skills are not sufficient to lead today’s nonlinear digital world with the deep learning curves. Lack of nonlinear leadership logic perhaps causes status quo, silo thinking, ineffective processes, or more management gaps such as retention issues, decreased engagement, scaling issues, low employee performance and morale, etc.

Great leaders inspire people to achieve what they want to achieve, take a logical approach to transform a crowd into a workable collective and even greater -into the fountain of human potential. In reality, much of what passes for leadership today is either 'survival managing' or 'status quo.’ Survival managing is when an organization's leaders say they want leadership at all levels, but what they really want and expect is not fine-tuned, so their leadership does not reach the next level of maturity. “Status quo” means when leaders lead, not for a cause or an idea, but to gain the status quo. It's one of those things that no matter where poor leadership is coming from, from a frontline manager all the way to a top executive member, it will have its repercussions. Everyone appreciates inferential leadership when leaders are leading that way, and what people want and need is a reason, a cause, a goal to be led toward. That's where the idea of 'transformative leadership' connects.

Leadership is induction & deduction; principle & discipline, methodology & practice: A philosophy will embed when great leaders understand themselves because there's a personal and emotive connection and when it answers the question of "what's in it for me." In order to make effective decisions and solve right problems, it is more important for senior executives to frame the right questions than hunting for the right answers, practice induction and deduction, develop new methodology and practices. if lack of strong business logic- a system is not in place, the policy is not set right, the roles are not defined, people don't understand the purpose of their roles, it will be very hard to run the business effectively and achieve expected business outcome.

Being willing to dive in rather than just dip your toes is sometimes needed. The human being needs to be enthused to participate and achieve goals courageously. The business management discipline is composed of a set of principles, processes, and practices. Inferential leadership logic helps to clarify vision and streamline actions. There are action steps you will have to take in your mind first. A leader must believe in his/her vision, feel the passion for the thing which needs to be done, hear others, especially the team, know the ways to get it, and they must walk the talk.

The dawn of the digital era is partly responsible for many of the prevailing global problems prevailing due to increasing pace of change and continuous disruption. Highly effective leaders need to have the capabilities by using the right language, strong logic, influence skills, personal brand development, enabling them to amplify leadership influences. They have their version of the playbook, inferential logic, and their handy toolbox to improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.

Read More

Intelligence & Influence

Leadership is the ability to influence with or without authority. The power of influence has many dimensions and depends on a number of factors.

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

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

      Intelligence & Influence

Intelligence and Influence Business leaders and professionals with multidimensional intelligences can handle unprecedented challenges facing in today’s enterprise skillfully, shape advanced digital mindsets and develop their leadership competency to make significant influence across the organization as well as the digital ecosystem. The digital era upon us is about information abundance and pervasive intelligence. Our intelligence with regard to any given type of...

IntegralLeadership Leadership is dynamic, innovative, and progressive. Static leadership does not work well in the digital age. Leadership innovation is a prototype practice, organizations need to keep experimenting, and exploring with audacity. Leadership is about the future, the future implicates changes and innovation. Leadership is about focusing attention and energy on the future to create a compelling and sustainable way forward. With unprecedented uncertainty...

Influence Leadership is the ability to influence with or without authority. The power of influence has many dimensions and depends on a number of factors. Nowadays we step into the digital economy with exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge; the world has been interwoven through the internet and the latest technologies, leadership becomes more interdisciplinary, influential and innovative. Every profession and role has its unique influence...

InfluenceCompetency With influential intelligence, the contemporary leaders or professionals can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, exemplify, encourage, and orchestrate change.Digital transformation is an evolutionary journey which means a renewed understanding of the future of business-what’re the disruptive trends; how your organization catalyzes the progressive changes and how much better you can do to leverage creativity and lead a seamless transformation....

InfluentialBoard Highly influential corporate boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. People tend to make leadership very complex, but in its most simple form, leadership is an influence. With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, the command control style of management is gradually losing its steam. Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and influential, to lead through influence

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

Read More

Quotes of "Unrelated"

Being creative is not just being knowledgeable, because creativity is often transdisciplinary, and interconnected with many seemingly unrelated dots, it’s the ability to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and capture insight.

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

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

Creativity is about asking open questions such as “What If,” “Why Not,” connecting dots which are usually seemingly unrelated because they are scattered in transdisciplinary domains.

Being creative is not just being knowledgeable, because creativity is often transdisciplinary, and interconnected with many seemingly unrelated dots, it’s the ability to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and capture insight.

One of the data quality perspectives is that, instead of having a variety of data quality properties, which are unrelated or independent to a number of different organizational forms that users have to translate or decipher, the focus should be on one standardized format that can be used by a number of users within classified user groups.

The SOARA Process employs a set of triggers of internal and external knowledge. This facilitates associations between what may have been regarded as unrelated parts of a problem.

Leaders with structured creativity may use their whole brain, do synthesis and analysis in a synchronized way, assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena, manage the order from chaos, and amplify voice from noise, they flattened hierarchy and challenge status quos.

Read More

Interdisciplinary Problem Prevention

Preventing problems is superior to fixing problems for us to step into the future confidently, understand talent with empathy and change the world effortlessly.

A "problem" is an opportunity waiting to happen. There are criteria that characterize good and bad statements of problems and opportunities. Any progressive change is technically a sort of opportunity management and problem-solving scenario. The prediction of the future is based on the analysis of the past. 

In today’s digital dynamic, every situation has choices, every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns. Defining a problem is a half way to solve it, preventing a serious problem from happening is superior to fixing it. Good problem solvers fix, great problem solvers prevent. Multidimensional thinking, interdisciplinary knowledge, and multifaceted approach are all critical components for premium problem management scenarios.

Scientific problem prevention: Uncertainty and risk are inherent in every venture, information exponentiality and change is new normal. It’s all in what you do with the information that ultimately matters. The best information based prediction is optimal to predict risks, prevent or solve problems scientifically. Business leaders and professionals today need to see further than what all others see; understand issues from broader perspectives and new angles; it’s about applying quality data to forecast what will happen in the business, and take steps further, what they should do upon it, to prevent problems at the strategic level. In the operational context of many organizations, data is collected as part of important business functions such as sales/marketing, human resources, logistics, quality control, and accounting, etc, linking data management to the multiple business domains within the enterprise and their business partners will create a richer value return.

Know your information, then see what it predicts. The quality of data defines the quality of your prediction. The optimal prediction system should have the best results in different areas according to the specific or customized quality criteria. Ideally, apply the real time analysis model to predict the potential problems from happening and prevent or manage them smoothly, and make data more “visible” for shareholders. The goal of predictive analysis is to take a proactive approach to either capture the rising business opportunities timely, or prevent potential risks effortlessly, track actuals against the forecast with tangible results.

Psychological problem prevention: Change is never for its own sake, but for problem-solving. It means that removal of something old and familiar because change is an evolutionary journey. There is change you want and change that is forced upon you. There is disruptive change and incremental change; positive change and negative change. Some change is inevitable and another change is purely elective. People are often the cause or the very reason to change and problem solving. Understanding the psychology behind change enables the management to prevent or manage problems smoothly. They understand how to influence the emotions of employees and instill positive psychology, so people won’t create new problems. Actually they are empowered, intrinsically motivated, creative to take initiatives and they are well trained and supported to solve problems large or small.

There are emotional burdens in many historical problems, and sometimes there are full emotion cycles behind problem-solving, and it is the mixed bag of positive emotions and negative emotions. Great problem-solvers enjoy understanding the complexity, put themselves in a self-awareness position of experiencing/seeing/hearing all sides of a problem/challenge, they can develop their own level of skills to read between lines, listen to not being said, find common ground and initiate dialogues, turn around the tough situations, avoid unnecessary pains, to prevent or handle problems mindfully.

Philosophical problem prevention: Philosophy is the mother of all sciences and it is a Greek portmanteau of the love of wisdom. It comprises logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology to solve problems cross-disciplinarily. Philosophy is also methodical and has deliberate processes for identifying questions, reasoning, identifying faulty reasoning, and thinking outside the box. A set of philosophical principles involves examining basic concepts such as truth, existence, reality, freedom to inspire people to ponder “right & wrong,” means of life, human civilization, interdependence and competition of the natural world and human society, etc. By following them, people can think profoundly and prevent some problems from happening.

Philosophically, there isn't always a right or wrong choice in any situation and there are a lot of grays. A 'problem' for one, is an 'opportunity' for the other; knowledge for one, information for the other, belief for one, disbelief for another, etc. Sometimes there is an obvious right or wrong solution to a problem which you have. But when someone else looks at the problem from their perspective, they may come up with different ideas as to what is right or wrong. Philosophy is the compass for us to pursue truth and a foundation to develop a multidimensional framework for schools of thoughts and inferential reasoning at the abstract level. So more and more people stop giving lip service to philosophy, but spend time on learning the rules of logic, proof, and apply philosophical principles to problem prevention.

Things are complex, people are complex, businesses are complex, and the world as a whole is complex as well. Problem-solving is about seeing a problem and actually finding a solution to that problem, not just the band-aid approach to fixing the symptom. Preventing problems is superior to fixing problems for us to step into the future confidently, understand talent with empathy and change the world effortlessly.

Read More