Ebooks

Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity, Volume 5
Pearl Zhu
Digital leaders are those who carry themselves with an air of confidence, vision, direction, and with the right dose of anger and empathy to fight for the better world. It is the level of consciousness of the leader, or the level of self-development in regards to the ability to embody the human experience, inspire both self and others, influence the surrounding positively, and innovate both hard things such as products/services, and soft things such as communication or culture, to make the world a better place. Here is the brief summary of the book “Leadership Master.” Chapter 1 Thought leadership: At today’s “digital dynamic with increasing speed of changes and hyper-competition, being a thoughtful, mindful and multi-dimensional thinker is more crucial to improve leadership effectiveness. Authenticity is the foundation to be a Thought Leader. Digital leadership is less about "HOW," more about "WHY," and “WHAT.” Leadership brand is less about what you look - the stereotypical leadership, and more about what you think - Thought Leadership. The digital Thought Leaders of the future sense, feel, read, imagine and intuit possibilities in the digital paradigm shift. The digital brainstorming is happening in real time with people and plays spontaneous networks of human and business operational concerns, to co-solve many thorny problems and overcome numerous challenges facing humanity. Being a Thought Leader also means you truly understand the purpose of leadership. Why do you want to be a leader, and which value can you bring in. Being able to quickly articulate the value that you bring to others is critical to helping others learn about how you can benefit them. Chapter 2 Creative leadership: Creativity becomes significantly important in the age with the advanced technologies because the leaders of the future will not be mere automatons. Great leaders are pioneers, innovators, and creators of a better context. Creative leadership is the unique combination of a growth mindset and leadership behaviors that develop and achieves high-quality results over a sustained period of time and risk tolerance. Chapter 3 Global Visionary Leadership: Leadership is forward-looking, to make progress. Leadership starts with having a vision, then develop a plan to achieve it. Top leaders are visionary roles, they set the direction for the enterprise (internal and/or external) to step into the uncharted water, and they orchestrate the digital transformation of an organization, its people, from the organization's current position to a position that best serves the interests of its customers, shareholders, and people. The means of 'orchestrate the transformation’ is, what distinguishes a great leader and a great organization. Chapter 4 Inquisitive Leadership: With “VUCA” characteristics (Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) of digital new normal and today’s cross-functional, cross-cultural, and cross-generational workforce, what keeps leaders successful is the intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be inquisitive, open to learning and applying these learnings as they move forward. Their inquisitiveness makes them more open to asking the right questions, embrace the other point of view, be empathetic to understand others, practice leadership without prejudice. Chapter 5 Profound Leadership: Back to the root of the word “profundity,” it means insightful and understanding. Climbing Knowledge-Insight-Wisdom pyramid is an important step in gaining profundity. It’s not just about knowing, but in-depth understanding; it requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information, too often assumptions and prejudices get in the way of understanding. It is the responsibility of each leader to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding. A mindful or thoughtful leader has a better perception to be a good communicator upon thinking profoundly, upon knowing when to voice out, when to keep silent; upon stri
Digital Master: Debunk the Myths of Enterprise Digital Maturity
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of DIGITAL MASTER is to envision the multidimensional impact that digital philosophy, technology, and methodology will have on the future of business and human society. In today’s overly complex, hyperconnected, and interdependent business dynamic, Digital Masters – the highly mature organizations – not only apply the most advanced digital technology into their business management disciplines but, more importantly, they orchestrate the harmonized digital symphony across all key business arenas, from shaping the digital mindset to building the high performing organization: • Develop visionary digital leadership • Shape open and creative digital mindsets • Craft and execute a holistic digital strategy • Advocate digital innovation next practices • Refine a highly effective enterprise culture • Optimize high-performing business capabilities • Explore data-rich digital Intelligence • Unleash enriched digital talent potential • Pursue high level digital maturity
Digital Agility: The Rocky Road from Doing Agile to Being Agile, Volume 4
Pearl Zhu
The world is moving into the deep, deep digital new normal with wide, wide digital connectivity and tall, tall digital pillars. Agility is one of such powerful pillars to leap digital transformation and enable the business to unleash its full potential. Organizational agility is about to create and react to changes. It is about to take into account any change in the environment and transform the organization to survive, grow, and transform. It is about to respond to emergent events proactively. The purpose of the book “Digital Agility” is to: Share the insight about agile philosophy and mindsets Clarify a set of agile principles and disciplines Develop the best and next agile practices to scale up Describe potential agile pitfalls and how to prevent them Connect the agile dots to build a creative working environment Measure the right things about agile and measure them right Sum up agile maturity from multidimensional perspectives Inspire healthy debates to move agile up to the next level of maturity The term ‘Agile’ is derived from ‘The Manifesto for Agile Software Development’ which describes a collaborative way of working based on a set of twelve principles that has come to mean early delivery of business value. The problem is people do not have a profound understanding of Agile principles and philosophy behind a set of Agile framework or tools. Most of the times they use the word "agile" when in fact they are talking about agile software development. The best way to fail is thinking that you will implement agile inside a business unit without taking into account the whole enterprise. Agile needs to be the philosophy to perceive multidimensional business values. Make the effort at the leadership and portfolio level to qualify and quantify value in terms of both strategic value and tactical value; direct revenue and indirect (vision/values/culture) terms is the first step to crafting high-level strategic intents. When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier. Once benefits of agile are visible and understood, a domino effect takes over, the organization as a whole becomes “agiler.” From “doing Agile to being agile” is a rocky road, not a straight path: Agile is direction, not a destination. Transforming to “Being Agile” means the business knows the direction they want to go on, and as people start “putting on” the agile mindset, discover new ways of working, collaborating, delivering value, they inspect and adapt in that journey by overcoming the frictions and challenges. You have to keep things rolling, to make agile not just a methodology to manage projects, but a principle instilled into a healthy culture to run the business more effectively. To move from Waterfall to Agile is not an act of one day. It is a journey. And as long as the journey is coming to a place where we can call the organization actually Agile, Waterfall and Agile do co-exist. Some organizations stop moving and remain in the hybrid state and some just turn back to go on the previous state of the waterfall and few actually reach the destination of the Agile world. So, hybrid organizations are the reality. Agile is neither just a methodology nor a set of practices, Agile is a state of mind. It’s the basic underlying principles of Agile! You can not expect big bang mindset change so you need to start with agile philosophy and some initial practices that pay off and reinforce, a mindset change is more difficult of a change and involves coaching, training, teaching and important discussions around what Agile is to the team, department, and company. Agile is first about doing right things before doing things right: Agile is about people and not tools and processes. Tools and processes are definitely going to be add on, in being agile, but they ar
CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It, Volume 2
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT is to provide guidelines for building a framework to run a highly effective, highly innovative and highly mature digital IT organization. Also, it provides the principles to reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. -Rebrand digital CIOs with multiple personas -Reinvent IT to unleash its full digital potential -Reenergize changes as an ongoing digital capability -Refine talent management to bridge IT skills gap -Remaster multidimensional IT to create multi-level business value -Renovate strategy execution continuum to improve effectiveness -Reimagine IT as an innovation engine to catalyze business growth -Reshape IT via leveraging “3P”s: Principle, Portfolio, Performance -Retool IT agility to adapt to changes Part I: CIO LEADERSHIP: The prominence of the CIO role has risen greatly as IT has become an increasingly important success factor of the digital organization. The CIO position has a shorter history, but a more dynamic role to play due to the continuous changes of information and technology. Compare to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. Part II: Unleash Digital Potential of IT: The business paradigm is shifting from the industrial age to a new digital era. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent, and they have to continue to adapt to the digital new normal with “VUCA” characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Now with the acceleration of digital speed, IT organizations are at a crossroad, where it will either reinvent its tarnished image or become irrelevant in the digital age. So the challenge facing IT leaders is on how to re-imagine IT and unleash its full digital potential.
100 Creativity Ingredients: Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity, Volume 12
Pearl Zhu
All humans are born with raw creativity ability. Creativity has many dimensions, with multi-faceted truth and myth, manifold knowledge and multidimensional insight. Creativity is the ability to create novel value and make a difference; the creative mind is defined as originator mastering “out-of-the-box” thinking to break through conventional wisdom. Creativity needs a problem to switch on the “light bulb power,” and the creative person needs a purpose to fuel positive energy. Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. Creative person’s spirit and soul dance with passion and imagination; creativity needs encouragement as food, and conflict to spark it. Creativity adds a signature or aesthetic sense that elevates passion to purpose and fancy to enchantment. Creativity is wings of our mind and tempo of our heartbeat. Creativity is a constructive disruption, not so bad addiction, and a sensational phenomenon. Creativity habit needs to be cultivated via practices, creativity muscle needs to be strengthened via daily grinding, and creativity excellence can be achieved. Creativity formula has many unique ingredients, read this book “100 Creativity Ingredients” to figure out. The purpose of “100 Creativity Ingredients - Everyone’s Playbook to Unlock Creativity “is to classify, scrutinize, articulate, and share insight about one hundred special creativity ingredients, to paint the picture with them, to add colors on them, to embed the music into them, and to make the story via them, in order to unleash our collective creativity potential. Chapter 1 Intellectual Ingredients: Creativity is the high level of thinking. Thinking is probably one of the most difficult things for human beings, the thinking capability well defines the difference between human and other creatures, and the level of thinking may also well reflect who we are. Chapter 2 Psychological Ingredients: If you consider being creative as a way of thinking, of imagining, of expression, of perceiving things, of inventing, of inspiring, etc, then it happens every day, multiple times a day. To gifted creatives, being creative is something that they are, whether they're consciously being creative or not. It is the psychological state of the mind depending on what you consider creativity and being creative. Chapter 3 Knowledge and Capability Ingredients: There is a philosophical connection between knowledge and creativity. Knowledge is path-dependent. This means that to discover an opportunity, you should have previous knowledge in the field to be able to get recognized. Imagination is also needed to be able to apply this previous knowledge to the different context. Nowadays creativity is an important professional capability, and the multitude of professional capabilities can enforce creativity as well. Chapter 4 Activity Ingredients: While we each have the enormous creative capacity, our willingness to exercise and express it becomes more complicated. Creative people are inspired to think and work nearly every day on creating, not reactively waiting for the “Aha” moment, but proactively stimulating the new energy with the fountain of creativity. Chapter 5 Motivational Ingredients: Creativity has many forms and manifestations. Take the standpoint that creativity has its starting point within an individual. Creativity can manifest in a collective environment. While the individual contributions provide the 'building block" of creativity, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is exciting. Creativity is innate with many special ingredients; and creativity can be developed if the conditions are right and there is knowledge, love, inspiration, encouragement and permission. Creativity is a long-term endeavor. Creativity can be abundant.
Digital Capability: Building Lego Like Capability Into Business Competency
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of the book “Digital Capability-Building Lego-Like Capabilities into Core Business Competency “ is to provide an insightful understanding of assessing, developing, and managing organizational capabilities in a structural way. The organization’s competency is based on a set of cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. The high-mature organizational capability is the digital business differentiator, to keep the business unique, competitive, and innovative, to improve business maturity significantly. The capability views enable dot connections and help the business identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build Lego-like capabilities into core business competency and improve the success rate of strategy execution and overall business maturity.
Talent Master: 199+ Questions to See Talent from Different Angles, Volume 6
Pearl Zhu
We live in a time of rapidly changing technology and business dynamic at the dawn of the Digital Era, The knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, and a huge skill gap in the workforce needs to be filled due to the continuously updated technology and regulation, digitalization and globalization, etc. Growth minds, new skills, or digital capabilities are needed every day. However, who are the future of digital leaders and professionals at the age of Digital? How do you define digital professionals, identify talent gaps, and improve digital professionalism both at the individual level and organizational Level? Generally speaking, a professional is an individual with the expertise of some specific area, who earns his or her livings from that expertise. Being professional also means that the individual not only has the skill but also presents the high-quality professionalism such as positive mentality and attitude, fair judgments and good behaviors, creativity and high intelligence. The book “Talent Master - 199 + Questions to See Talent from Different Angles“ is the guidebook to help digital professionals shape digital fit mindset, improve multidimensional digital intelligence, build a unique set of digital capabilities, inspire creativity, improve professionalism, and unleash their full talent potential. It is also a playbook to help digital leaders and business managers set updated digital principles to innovate talent management, performance management, acknowledgment management and culture management, to integrate them into a holistic people management solution, and leap digital transformation to the next level of maturity. Chapter 1 Digital Fit: “Digital fit” should be first defined as “mind fit.” The right mindset is an utmost quality for being a right fit because the power of the mind is the force to change the business or even the world for better, and then following with attitude fit and behavior fit. Digital contemporary fitness requires envisioning new perspectives, shaping new boxes of thinking, and building new competency. Chapter 2 Digital Intelligence: Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. Whether someone is "intelligent" or not depends entirely on what you are asking them to accomplish with their brain. Digital intelligence is multidimensional and contextual, with ultimate goals to gain wisdom. Chapter 3 Digital Creativity: Creativity is the high level of intelligence. Creativity is expressive, productive, inventive, innovative and emergent. The innovators with digital creativity are simply those who can see what's around, and easily and effortlessly discover a better way to do things. Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination with which you create new ideas and the concreteness with which you can transform ideas into real work. Chapter 4 Digital Professionalism: The online dictionary defines “professionalism is the skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well.” Hence, it doesn’t mean if you had a profession, you would be automatically a well-respected professional with professionalism. High professionalism is a mindset, principle, and discipline. Chapter 5 Digital Potential: Potential is about future performance, not past performance. How well do individuals continue to perform and grow in their current roles, how likely can they take on new challenges at work, rapidly learn and grow into next-level roles, or roles that are expanded and redefined as the business changes? Individuals showing potential are distinguished usually by their mastery of new roles quickly and effectively, learning more rapidly than their peers, more innovate in problem-solving. Either at individual or business level, performance helps you motiva
Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards, Volume 7
Pearl Zhu
Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward 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 agility to adapt to changes, and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. If a Board is to fulfill its fiduciary responsibilities to its stakeholders, it needs to take a professional and systematic approach for assessing strategy, prioritizing agendas, advising changes, overseeing risks and keeping track of business performance via efficient tools. BoDs perhaps do not always participate in developing business strategy, but the Board needs to determine suitability, adequacy, viability, and sustainability of the organization in advance. Chapter 1 The Digital Themes of Boardrooms: With many organizations and the society as a whole reach the inflection point of digital transformation, the modern corporate board as one of the top governance bodies plays a crucial role in setting business leadership tones and driving the organization’s digital transformation. A professional digital board is not only about filling with cool-headed, high-professional and high-intelligent BoDs, but also about tuning the structured process to digitize itself, optimize decision-making capacity, inspire innovation, and improve its overall effectiveness, agility, and maturity. Chapter 2 A Strategic Board: The board plays a critical role in overseeing business strategies, it is important to keep the board strategically focused. Also, the board as the top leadership team advises business strategies, it doesn’t always mean the Board itself is being strategic enough. The board represents the ownership and they really cannot do a good job if they don't have the knowledge to challenge and set the broad strategic goals. They need to educate themselves by hearing different views about the organization, its environment & digital ecosystem, strategic alternatives and develop a clear vision on how to move the business forward. Chapter 3 A Performance-driven Board: Corporate Performance Management (CPM) has many descriptors and understandings globally. However, there is universal agreement that best practice performance management frameworks should inform the board, management, staff and key stakeholders on the performance of the organization in delivering services or programs efficiently, in achieving organizational outcomes effectively and in making the progress towards achieving sustainability effortlessly. There is no question that performance is the priority for boards. Many boards think that the role of the individual director is conformance, which has the result to stifle probing questions and natural tensions that allow for good decision-making. There is no doubt that the board only fulfills its role to shareholders and the management team when it is focused on performance. To some degree, conformance is inherent within the value-driven performance. Chapter 4 An Innovative Board: The Board of Directors are interactive change agents that represent the organization, stockholders, and senior management. No longer are boards sitting in a room and just voting on various policies. It is one of the requirements of the Board members to participate, or even lead, in constantly suggesting areas of innovation since their vistas are likely to be wider, and also because the Board should be highly accountable for strategies for the future of the company. The board plays a crucial role in management innovation as well. Management innovation means to accelerate innovation at the multitude of levels, to create the space for dialogue and debate about why it is important for their organization, developing a common understanding of it, creating the necessity and motivation for it. It also needs to align innovation strategy
Quality Master: The World Class Insight About Quality
Pearl Zhu
Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or inter-relational interactions surpasses the silo-based organizational capacity. Quality management ensures that in an organization, products or services are consistent to meet customers’ satisfaction. Digital Quality management needs to take an overarching approach with multidisciplinary practices. Quality is everyone’s business. This book “Quality Master: The World Class Insight about Quality” is not about discussing specific quality standards or techniques well adopted in different industries, but for sharing some insight on how to understand the multitude of quality attributes from different perspectives, recognize quality champions to inspire quality culture, set digital principles and develop the best and next digital quality management practices.
Digital Gaps: Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Business
Pearl Zhu
“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guide book to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge and a step-wise approach to make a leap of digital transformation.
Decision Master: The Art and Science of Decision Making, Volume 13
Pearl Zhu
“Decision Master” is the guidebook to perceive digital mindsets with multidimensional decision intelligence, define a set of decision-making principles, articulate potential pitfalls in decision-making scenario, describe digital decision-making styles, summarize the important elements in building the decision-making capability and taking stepwise steps to achieve decision maturity. Chapter 1 Decision Intelligence: Intelligence has been defined in several ways. First, intelligence is a cognitive process involving rational and abstract thinking. Second, it is goal-directed and purposeful, and it means that all intelligent activities such as decision-making, are planned to reach a self-determined goal. Finally, it involves social competence to help individuals adjust to their environmental surroundings. It is important to make sound decisions via leveraging multidimensional intelligence. Chapter 2 Decision-Making Principles: One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in businesses and industries based on effective and efficient decision making. It’s important to set well-defined principles for guiding decision-making on a day to day basis. The principles as a digital compass will guide all levels of the organization to be able to make decisions in a very organic relationship with its environment. Chapter 3 Digital Decision-Making Styles: Decision making is both the art and science. Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But in practice, each person has his or her own cognitive strength, knowledge expertise, capability, experience, or the tailored style to become a decision master. At group setting, in order to make the best decisions, it is better having a mix of complementing mindsets, skills and decision-making styles for achieving decision maturity. Chapter 4 Decision-Making Pitfalls: Making decision is one of the significant tasks for digital leaders and professionals today. However, the high ratio of strategic decisions has been made poorly and causes catastrophic effects. What are key factors contributing to poor quality decision-making? How to avoid potential decision-making pitfalls for improving decisions effectiveness and maturity. Chapter 5 Decision Maturity: The reason decision making is often a difficult task because it is contextual and situational, it takes a unique individual to understand a situation and relate it to the present. There are many variables in complex decision making, there are tradeoffs you have to leverage, and there is no magic formula to follow. At the Digital Era, making wise decisions means to leverage multidimensional thought processes, advanced analytic tools, the human intuition, and efficient processes to improve the overall effectiveness and maturity of decision making. Decision making is an art only until the person understands the science (process, analytics, tool, etc.). It takes the multidisciplinary approach, to frame the right questions before answering them. It has to leverage multidimensional decision intelligence with a combination of both creative thinking and critical thinking, divergent thinking and convergent thinking, strategic thinking and systems thinking, holistic thinking and paradoxical thinking. Ensure you are both information savvy and be flexible to select the optimal solutions with decision wisdom.
Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit
Pearl Zhu
The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and ability to adapt to changes. Digital Fit doesn't mean that everyone needs to have the same thought processes, the same personalities, the same preferences, or the same experiences. What is digital fit, and how do you define digital fit? The purpose of “Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit“ is to share insight about multidimensional enterprise fit from digital characteristics, organizational structure, change, knowledge, and talent perspectives; evoke critical and paradoxical thinking about digital “fit vs. misfit,” spark healthy debates on how to define and develop true digital fit, and build a fitting working environment to inspire creativity and accelerate digital transformation.
Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of the book “Digital Boardroom: 100 Q&As “is to share 100 insightful questions for rejuvenating the boardroom to get digital ready. It is important for boards to make invaluable inquiries and take proactive approaches for leading digital transformation seamlessly. - Question and brainstorm on much-needed oversight and additional rigor to the boardroom composition and succession planning process. -Practice critical thinking and independent thinking for identifying blind spots, criticizing the strategy constructively and advising management insightfully. -Practice “out-of-the-box” thinking to ask open-ended questions about IT and how to build an IT friendly and technology-savvy digital board. -Practice strategic thinking and systems thinking, ask insightful questions, to become the mastermind of digital transformation. -Make profound inquiries about the future of leadership, constantly question the status quo and set the digital leadership tone to get digital ready.
100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of “100 Digital Rules: Setting Guidelines to Explore Digital New Normal “ is to establish digital principles and update business policies that can be applied holistically and guide the digital transformation systematically. Digital rules are based on a set of fundamental beliefs behind the methodologies and they help to shape mindsets behind behaviors. Digital rules encourage mindfulness, authenticity, creativity, inclusiveness, and discourage static thinking, silo, and bureaucracy, help to accelerate collective human progress.
Unpuzzling Innovation: Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way, Volume 11
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of “Unpuzzling Innovation - Mastering Innovation Management in a Structural Way“ is to demystify innovation puzzle in a structural way. Chapter 1 Innovation classification: Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature including incremental innovation, evolutionary innovation, and radical innovation; hard innovations such as products/service innovation, business model or process innovation, and soft innovations such as leadership innovation, communication innovation, and culture innovation. The gap between incremental and radical innovation is huge both in terms of outcomes if successful and on how to approach. Chapter 2 Innovation principles: Digital brings both unprecedented opportunities and risks to the businesses today. Every innovation-the creative pursuit has the risk in it. You're accepting risk for potential reward. Therefore, it is important to set principles for managing innovation and handling risk in a structural way. The principles and guidelines help to further frame processes, measures, and control. Chapter 3 Digital innovators: Creativity is a high level of thinking and intelligence. Intelligence is the quick and clear perception of any situation, plus ability to adjust to any circumstances. It is contextual and multidimensional. Digital innovators present leadership skills, master at creative communication, understand what is wrong with the status quo, have the good sense and sound judgment to attract and surround themselves with the right people, and work collaboratively to do more with innovation. Chapter 4 Connecting innovation dots: Creativity is infused with an inner cohesion and comes from a vision of uniqueness. Creativity is simply about connecting the dots. Creativity needs a problem, and a creative person needs a purpose. Chapter 5 Digital innovation next practices: Digital innovation has a broader spectrum with hybrid nature, it is the incremental improvement- radical innovation continuum. It is hard to think of any innovation as not a hybrid, a combination of something old with something new or a number of new things. Chapter 6 Innovation paradox: Innovation is to transform the novel ideas and achieve their business value. Innovation is not just about ideas or exchanging ideas, based on most of the innovation models, idea creation is only one step of the innovation process. Therefore, in a basic view, innovation is a process and every process needs to be managed. Chapter 7 Innovation gaps and pitfalls: Innovation fails because, there are too many disconnects that occur between the birth of a vision/concept and the process of turning it into a reality. Innovation fails because businesses lack cognitive ability to think alternatives. The reasons why failure occurs vary widely. It is no wonder why many leaders are reluctant to act on bold ideas with good business potential due to the high likelihood of failure. Chapter 8 Innovation measurement: The impact of innovations on enterprise performance ranges from effects on turnover and market share to changes in productivity and efficiency. The problem is often that the initiative is not well defined. Without well-defined goals, you won’t have the effective plan and enough time to generate results. So, it is difficult to measure the impact without taking the time to generate impact.
Thinkingaire: 100 Game Changing Digital Mindsets to Compete for the Future, Volume 8
Pearl Zhu
The term digital " THINKINGAIRES" we advocate in this book refers to the talented digital leaders and professionals who continue to create new ideas, to practice thought leadership, and to bring the world both content richness and context intelligence. They are the “IMAGINEERS” who can always come up with the fresh perspectives and think differently; they are the “VISIONEERS” who can digest, analyze and synthesize information and knowledge, to visualize the future clearly; they are the ENTREPRENEURS or INTRAPRENEURS who are creative in thinking about the alternative way to do things, and they are the “CHANGE AGENTS” who can create synergies from people, capability and the digital ecosystem that are greater than the sum of their parts. “THINKINGAIRE” is the guidebook to help digital leaders and professionals understand and cultivate digital thinking mindsets to compete for the future: “Out-of-Box” Thinking Minds: “Out-of-Box” is a shortened form, a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. Out-of -Box thinking implies a certain level of creativity or unconventional problem solving. -Systems Minds: Systems Thinking provides the holistic way to view problems, better and more accurate understanding of the overall situation via connecting parts and whole, better defining the problems and how you should go about solving them and in what sequence. -Hybrid Minds: Hybrid Thinking is a set of interdisciplinary and integrative thinking processes we will need to solve many of today’s complex problems, which require strategic consideration, systems intelligence, innovative approaches, cross-cultural and cross-generational perspectives, and multi-dimensional cognition. -Agile Minds: In a broader scope, "agility" is a philosophy of managing complexity and unpredictability through empiricism. Agility is the ability to adapt to the changes. Agile minds see the world through the lens of three “I”s: Interaction, Improvement, and Innovation. Agile is a new, radical style of leadership. -Intellectual Minds: Intelligence is the capacity to understand and apply wisdom to the knowledge you are exposed to. There are as many different ways to characterize intelligence as there are different types and forms of information impinging on our senses. -High - EQ Minds: Emotional Intelligence in its simplest form is being aware of our emotions and managing them to get best out of the situation. It’s also about trying to understand other emotions and be empathetic. -Paradoxical Minds: The paradox is a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities. The paradox is the result of two opposing truths existing side by side, which can be both right. The paradox is also like the two sides of the coin, they are not just opposite, but also complementary, to make it a whole. -Progressive Minds: Progress represents change. Without change, one cannot even stagnate; she or he will be on a backward journey. Progress itself is change, whether it comes from individual or group efforts or is induced by environmental and cultural, tangible or intangible forces. Metaphorical Minds: Psychologically, creative, metaphorical and poetic impulses and language congeal over time into systems of thought that take on a quality of being permanently true, through being institutionalized, systematized, and professionalized. Professional Minds: A professional mind goes beyond professions, but we can always learn more about the thought processes from varying professionals as well. It takes a decade to grow a tree, and it takes more than one generation to shape the right mindset. Anti-Digital Mindsets: Digital Transformation requires mind shift. In addition to the set point changing, transformation requires first shifting mindsets, and then building new capabilities & skills, reinforcing and embedding new practices and reflexes. Mind vs. Mind: make an ‘apple to apple’ mind comparison in a reasonable wa
Digital Valley: Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence, Volume 3
Pearl Zhu
We are moving to the deep, deep digital dynamic, hopefully, we are also moving from the Industrial Age to the Digital Era with the abundance of wisdom slowly and steadily. The purpose of Digital Valley - Five Pearls of Wisdom to Make Profound Influence is to guide digital leaders and professionals to understand the multidimensional digital wisdom in making fair judgments and sound decisions on the daily basis, also, inspire them to make a profound positive influence on both professional career and personal life. If knowledge is concrete, intelligence is contextual, and then wisdom is abstract and wider, with the following dimensions: Chapter 1 Creative wisdom: Creativity is a higher level of thinking which could leads to wisdom because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously use different kinds of thought processes and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites etc., when you are wanting to come up with a creative solution to a challenge. A certain mental, psychological and conditional chemistry is needed to break-away from thoughts that others have thought about. So creativity appears to be beyond the conventional thinking - where you have left the confines of other people's thoughts. Creativity is context - dependent, so it could mean a type of contextual intelligence. Chapter 2 Strategic wisdom: Strategic Thinking is the ability to think on a temporal plane. Strategic Thinking is about where you are, where you want to be, identify the gap and create the alternate approaches to anticipate and provide solutions. Strategic Thinking is more about making decisions directly towards achieving defined outcomes as a purposive activity, so it is the “keep the end in mind” thought process. It is the wisdom because the strategy is often the guide and roadmap to navigate us toward the right direction. Chapter 3 System Wisdom: Systems Thinking is a way of understanding complexity. Systems Thinking by definition is a cognitive thinking process, a profound thinking process to embrace holism and nonlinearity. Systems Thinking is a type of synthetic thinking with a complex mix of several components, typically it includes: Dynamic Thinking (positioning your issue as part of a pattern of behavior that has developed over time); Scientific Thinking (using models to test hypotheses and discard falsehoods, not just to ascertain ‘the truth’); Cause-effective Thinking (constructing a model to explain how the problem behavior arises); ‘Forest’ Thinking (seeing the ‘big picture’ and taking a more holistic view of that system); Analytical Thinking (analyzing how things actually work, the cause and effect relationships), and Quantitative’ Thinking: (quantifying not just the hard data but also the soft variables that are operating in the system). Chapter 4 Decision wisdom: The majority of leaders and professional spend a significant amount of time on making large or small decisions in the work and life. It takes wisdom (and often collective wisdom) to make effective decisions. There is fuzziness in the decision because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria. At the digital era, making data-based decisions means to leverage analytical thinking , advanced analytic tools, the human’s intuition, and add the “wisdom” in the decision process to improve the overall effectiveness of decision making. Chapter 5 Culture wisdom: The definition of culture is “the mindsets, attitudes, feelings, values and behaviors that characterize and inform a group and its members.” From business perspective, culture is the way how we think and do things around here, it is the collective mindset; with the trend of digitalization and globalization, culture wisdom is the type of intelligence for tolerance of ambiguity, a set of capabilities for cultural cognition, learning agility, handling complexity, communicating virtually, and working across cultures with flexibility. Therefore, culture intelligence becom
Change Insight: Change as an Ongoing Capability to Fuel Digital Transformation, Volume 9
Pearl Zhu
There are many books written about changes, but very few dig into the mindset level. Change Management starts with a thought, with a flash of insight, insight is the act or result of understanding the inner nature of changes or of seeing things intuitively. It leads to a vision; then leads to a culture shift, strategic changes, or leadership transformation. It’s important to understand the big WHY about changes, no change is for its own sake, the first step is to define the value proposition and determine demand and estimated pipeline. Insight is thinking into the box after thinking out of the box. Thus, insight takes creativity and reasoning, intuition and logic, the power of acute observation and deduction, questioning, connection, penetration, and discernment. Change Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific change context. Change Insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues of a situation, which leads to understanding and resolution about changes. Change has different scopes and effects, from small changes such as software updating, business process tuning; to radical changes such as culture innovation, or big-bang changes such as radical digital transformation. Often change is an “un” nature activity, you need to focus, also, make an effort to sustain it. So the newly established behaviors or the new way to work will be in harmony with the well-defined value propositions so that change can maintain its momentum. Too often, people take the easy path, think and work at a superficial level rather than spending the time to understand what’s going on underneath. Insight is the understanding of cause and effect, based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario in Change Management. Change Management is always challenging with a high percentage of failure rate. Indeed, change is difficult. Some say, change is not a problem, the primary reason for change failure is resistance to change while the secondary reason is the inability of leaders to deal with resistance. The purpose of the book “Change Insight” is to: -Dig deeper to analyze the psychology behind changes and handle problems and changes at the level of the mindset. -Explore people-centric change management philosophy and practices. -Differentiate change leadership and change management, orchestrate change at all level of the organization. -Set Change Management principles to inform and support the way of managing change effectively. -Build change as an ongoing capability, not just a one-time business initiative. -Analyze the potential change pitfalls and roadblocks on the change journey. -Make objective change assessment and measurement from multidimensional lens. -And ultimately build high-mature organizations with changeability to fuel the digital transformation.
DIGITAL IT: 100 Q&As
Pearl Zhu
The purpose of “Digital IT-100 Q&As “ is to summarize 100+ classic and emergent digital debates about digital IT leadership and management, brainstorm how to run a holistic digital business from multidimensional lens, share digital holism and strategic insight, keep IT digital fit, deal with both IT management dilemmas and innovation paradoxes effortlessly, guide today’s digital leaders and professionals to learn the valuable lessons across industrial and geographical boundaries, develop the best and next digital practices to tailor their needs, set the right priorities to achieve high performance, and build a solid digital brand, with the goal to accelerate digital transformation.
12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO's Situational Leadership Practices
Pearl Zhu
Compared to other CxO positions, the CIO role is considerably new with about three decades of history. But the contemporary CIO is one of the most sophisticated leadership positions in modern businesses. Great CIOs have multiple personas, varying personalities, and impressive leadership profiles. The book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence.
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