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Confuse means with ends: With high velocity and unprecedented level of uncertainty, the business management today needs to see the whole picture, determine what the future needs to look like and what digital transformation must look like. The wrong end can lead to catastrophic business setback. More often than not, organizations have to adjust their directions accordingly in order to adapt to frequent changes promptly. In reality, many companies focus on transactional level of activities, keep the business spinning but going nowhere. The stagnation will further make the business irrelevant gradually and lose its competitive advantage. If some companies thought they are playing with fancy technology gadgets, thus, they are riding the tide of digitalization, perhaps they also confuse means with ends. Keep in mind, information technology is the means to an end, not the end. Information is the gold when it has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right products, services, or business models, enter a new market, or explore a new digital channel, etc. Technology is the savior if it can improve customer satisfaction, empower employees to change or catalyze innovation. When the organizations can focus on problem-solving, they are able to dig into underlying business processes and pain areas, bring out customer-tailored and technology-driven solutions, and devote more attention to what organizations really care about. Digital transformation is not just about technology, it has to expand into every direction of the business for unlocking business performance and improving the organizational maturity.

Put the wrong people in the position to solve wrong problems: As always, people are the most invaluable business asset and capital, but often the weakest link for business transformation. Putting the right people with the right capability to solve the right problem is simply the biggest challenge facing businesses and our society today. And it’s much easier to say than doing because it involves multiple intelligence judgment and assessment processes to evaluate people and problems in an objective way. In today’s VUCA new normal, complex problem solving takes interdisciplinary understanding or integral professional competencies to both frame the right problems and solve them in the right way. When organizations make talent assessments only based on linear logic or conventional talent management methodology, more often or not, they miss the point and put the wrong people to solve wrong problems or even create more problems. Cognitively, often people are both the cause and the center of the problem. Diagnosing the problem from the mindset level is a critical step for digging into the root causes of many problems today. Thus, the assessment should start at the mindset level, quality counts, dynamic counts, and learning agility counts. Select the right people who possess the advanced mind with multidimensional intelligence, proficient knowledge, nonlinear skills and unique problem-solving competencies to move the business forward and accelerate digital transformation.

Ignore measuring something important or measure the wrong things: You can only manage what you measure, mis-measurement and ineffective performance management cause the business mighty fall. From a strategic management perspective, one of the most dangerous pitfalls of performance measurement is when performance system is connected with the motivation system on an operational level, but disconnected from the strategy management. Sometimes, metrics motivate people to game the data, rather than make real achievement; encourage mediocrity, rather than creativity; or the metrics only tell part of the story but ignore the full pictures, etc. Keep in mind, the right metrics are requested in the right context; it’s important to explain to the upper management of why they are requested, to ensure the management buy-in. To avoid varying performance measurement pitfalls, the management needs to clarify which culture you would like to shape and what kind of behavior you should encourage. It’s critical to ensure that digital performance measures are both qualitative and quantitative, correlate to build differentiated business competency and achieve better business outcomes. The effective performance management directly impacts on day-to-day decision-making, business adaptability, and overall organizational maturity.

There is no one size fits all formula to build strategy competency and run a high performance digital business. Digital leaders must ensure the business having a clear vision, well-defined business goals and gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors. Each organization just has to "walk the talk," avoid hidden trap or fatal mistakes and explore their unique way to enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is a mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly. Slideshare Presentation

                 Overcoming the Variety of Business Inertia 

How to Overcome Three Digital Inertia We have moved into the deep, deep digital age when information is abundant and where creativity becomes a baseline competence. The race of information against the machine is ongoing, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. Many organizations are also at a crossroad facing unprecedented change and uncertainty, the significant business transformations are needed to digitalization, globalization, and radical innovation management. However, statistically, more than two-thirds of Change Management effort fails to achieve the expected result, so what are the digital inertia you need to deal with, in order to manage a successful digital transformation journey frictionlessly and ultimately build a Digital Master?

How to Handle Change Inertia with Empathy Change is the new normal, but it also becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations due to the change inertia, also because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. Statistically, more than 70% of the change management effort fails to achieve the expected result. So, which principles should you follow to communicate changes and transformation is dimensionally bigger, and much more pervasive/ invasive, how to weave all important elements in Change Management more seamlessly to orchestrate a harmonized digital transformation symphony?

How to Overcome Learning Inertia Digital means the abundance of information and a shortened knowledge cycle. As companies around the world transform themselves into the digital business that is based on ‎information, their ability to explore intangible assets such as information and knowledge has become far more decisive to build competitive business advantages. Both at the individual and organizational level, if you fail to climb the learning curve, you will get static and lag behind. Business leaders should be aware of learning curves or learning inertia, make an objective assessment of their organization’s learning competency.

How to Overcome the Inertia in Decision Making One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many management teams are happy to "put off making decisions till tomorrow, that is needed today." This is nothing new; in many organizations, indecision is masked as patience. So what’re the root causes in deferring making a decision? And how to overcome such inertia in decision making?

Change Management Sum Up: How to Overcome Change Inertia II Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change efforts fail to achieve the expected results. What are the barriers to cause change failures, how to overcome change inertia, how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy, and manage change life cycle effectively?

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 3 million page views with about #6000 blog posting. 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.

1 There’s knowing unknown, and here’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots. The blind spots are perhaps inevitable, the point is how business leaders or managers should learn to deal with them seamlessly.

2 The root causes of blinds port are often the people’s mentality such as ego or bias, thought processes such as lack of “whole brain” thinking, or lack of knowledge or insight.

3 It’s important to build high-performance teams with the heterogeneous group setting, complementary skills, and distinctive capabilities in order to fill blind spots, clear business vision, and spur creativity

4 To close blind spots, you have to be humble to realize there are many things you know you don’t know and perhaps even more which you don't know what you don't know. Until that happens, you will continue in the lives of blindness

5 Continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots by learning how to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

6 Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution.

7 To close blind spots, be humble to learn; be hungry for the insight, be skillful to frame the right questions and behold to the metrics.

8 You need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot, whatever it is and check the "mirrors" that you appreciate the huge favor and gift they have provided you.

9 The company's reputation and success today are founded on innovation and to a very large extent, innovation closes blind spots. The productivity is higher in an innovative organization, and an innovative organization has less blind spots because people do not fear to provide feedback.

Blind spot: To survive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations must adapt to rapid changes by making effective decisions in a consistent way. Often, there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas and varying blind spots in decision making. Blind spots are usually caused by silo thinking and homogeneous team-setting. They will cloud your vision, trigger poor judgment and lead ineffective decision-making. Therefore, it’s important to challenge, debate, and initiate dynamic and respectful dialogue to broaden perspectives and close blindspots.

In reality, many companies still have rigid organizational hierarchy and bureaucratic culture, their business is still the sum of pieces rather than a holistic whole. Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution. Thus, it’s important to develop high-performance leadership team with cognitive difference, complementary skills and distinctive capabilities to identify and fill blind spots and improve their leadership effectiveness.

Dark spot: Individually, negative emotions create dark spots - your fear drains energy and thwarts creativity; your ego is a mask or a costume that you wear in the great play of career or life to hide your authenticity; your envy degrades your integrity or professionalism, etc. Collectively, in the business environment, silo or bureaucratic thinking creates dark spots and generates negative energy. It’s about fear of failure; fear to get out of old habits, fear to lose the status quo. It makes people feel threatened, that’s why learning is stressful. Negative emotions create dark energy, drive misjudgment, and cause inertia to adopt the right course of action. To brighten the dark spot, learn to abide by nature and let the positive dominate the negative through continuous learning, adapting and maturing. As the society, the negative behaviors caused by negative emotions should be discouraged, organizations and society should adore and appreciate those individuals who are directed towards using their superior skills or unique abilities for driving progressive changes and making a better world.

Sweet spot: Compared to change, business transformation is definitely the more ambitious sounding term and a large scale of changes. It is like a treasure hunting journey to uncover the sweet spots and discover hidden gems for business growth. Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science. They should practice strategic thinking by envisioning the future and clarifying the reality, keep asking themselves and others: What’s our strategic sweet spot? What’s our competitive advantage? What’s the future of business? What's our unique competency? Etc. Organizations that are skillful at exploring the sweet spots of growth can gain long term business advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value and build differentiated business advantages. To explore these sweet spots for growth, people are encouraged to take initiatives of stepping outside of the box, seek additional knowledge and experience, and focus on the learning opportunities provided by assignment, rather than on the status quo. Digital is the age of customers. focusing on customer needs should be an easier path to identify sweet spots and grow the innovation fruits continually.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It’s critical to gain a contextual business understanding, look for those critical “hidden spots,” which is not always obvious, see around the corner, read between the lines, to overcome barriers and identify growth opportunities for making a leap to reach the next level of organizational maturity.