ABC NET

1 Mentorship motivates people by allowing them to learn by giving them the time and the confidence to work out for themselves what needs to be done in certain situations.

2 Great leaders should be ideal mentors, If the leaders are not willing to mentor the next generation of leaders, it will lead to reduced competitiveness and effectiveness and suboptimal business results.

3 By mentoring you are showing that you value others, and in order to add value to others, you need to hold people in high regard, not only for who they are but for the potential that lies inside of them.

4 Mentorship is about guiding, advising, interpreting, and influencing: This is radically different from the command-and-control style of leadership.

5 Learning, coaching, and practicing leadership are the iterative continuum that is improved by constant learning and practice.

6 A well established and functioning mentoring process is invaluable for an organization to develop its next-generation leaders and for the current leadership to stay attuned to the realities of their ecosystem

7 Mentorship inspires the culture of learning. There should be a balance between the organization and the individual where the responsibility for learning is concerned

8 Mentoring and talent development can be well embedded in organizational innovation management lifecycle, it's the practice based on mutual interest and encourages close collaboration.

9 Mentorship is both art & science, it inspires the culture of learning, build the effective leadership team, improve agility in the organization,

Unpredictability: Modern organizations are complex systems which tend to be non-linear and thus, hard to predict the upcoming changes on the way. Often, a part of nonlinear business system emits more energy and that’s going beyond the linear response of that part. It means small changes in the initial conditions could have a much larger and unpredictable consequences in the outcomes of the business system. From the business management perspective, even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. It is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sort through and processed to make sure its coherence. When information is refined into the business foresight and customer insight, it becomes the “light tower” to navigate the business in the right direction. It requires to take leaps of setting some of the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and re-balancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes.

Uncertainty: The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Uncertainty (of outcomes or occurrences) is inherent in almost every business endeavor, More specifically, uncertainty is a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance. From a strategic management perspective, although there is not so much you could do about uncontrollable situation. Still, a good plan can identify external business factors and a structural process can enable an organization to walk around the externals. From a leadership perspective, great leaders supply the framing context in understanding uncertainty and encourage optimism, help to mitigate the impact of uncertainty or risks by enabling a team to encounter uncertainty and deal with it strategically and systematically. They need to visualize and identify uncertainty, convert uncertainty to risk through the application of quantification methods in order to be able to manage uncertainty as risk, and move up management maturity from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

The board’s insightful view to identifying the problem: Boards oversee business strategy and fundamentally, the strategy is about diagnosing business problems, making choices, and taking actions to achieve well-defined goals. Thus, board directors should have sharp eyes to identify problems and unique insight to pinpoint the root causes. Because 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. The Board of Directors as “Problem-Definer” should understand what is exactly wrong, out of balance, stagnation, etc., the exact description of the problem, and how to frame the right problem and solve it smoothly. Otherwise, fixing the wrong cause of a problem is creating more gaps and lead to even more serious problems later on. Asking good and pertinent questions are critical for governing changes so the directors would have to be able to quickly assess top critical business issues and make sound decisions consistently. To be a good problem-definer, BoDs need to gain deep insight into how things work just by analyzing the aggregates, not necessary to dive into the trivial details. Board Directors need to understand the difference between being a director and the operator of the business. To avoid micromanagement, boards are more as problem-definer than the direct problem-solving because they often delegate the well-defined problems to management for solving them on time or implementing solutions to tailor varying circumstances effectively.

Identify qualified problem solvers:Identify the problem - what is exactly wrong, out of balance, unjust, etc., the exact description of the problem. When the problem is well-defined, it is also important to spot the right person (people) with the right mindset and skills to solve it. One of the most important management disciplines today is to put the right people with the right capabilities in the right position to solve the right problem timely. Corporate boards can set the right tones for innovating talent management and improve the overall problem-solving competency of the business. High IQ and EQ are both important for effective problem-solving. Problem-solving is a mindset with curiosity, self-inclusiveness, creativity, and progression, which directly impacts the intellectual sophistication of problem-solving capability. There is as much creative thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking and system thinking that go into problem identification as well as solution discovery. People who can solve problems in a new way are innovators. Emotional intelligence is also critical for problem-solving because it is the ability to harness positive emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving, dispassionately analyze the situation objectively in order to make the sound judgment. From the boardroom to coffee room, be cautious of those "problem-creating" mindsets, such as silo thinking, polar thinking (we are right, they are wrong); non-critical thinking (reflexive, not reflective), stereotypical thinking (based on outdated perception), small thinking (locally right, globally wrong) or static thinking (we always do things this way), have a difficult time to solve tough problems, and continue to argue “it’s impossible.” Therefore, identify qualified problem-solvers are imperative because misfit minds and skills will cause more problems and decelerate the speed of business changes.


Evaluate outcomes: The evaluation of problem-solving is to ensure the real problems have been fixed and cause the least side effects as possible. It is important to keep track of the outcome of strategic problem-solving at the board level by asking the management tough questions: Has the problem been fixed permanently? Does the solution cause any side effects, or cause more serious issues later on? Who are the real problem-solvers? Work with management to find the factors involved in the final "incorrect" outcome. See if they can measure or weigh each factor's contribution to the result, or the description of the unit of measure. Build a hypothetical equation that describes "incorrect" outcomes. Taking a systematic approach to measurement can avoid blind-spots in problem-solving management. The organization that didn't have a systematic approach to measurement and analysis at both the strategic level and operational level has a giant blind spot that is impairing their performance or problem-solving effectiveness. Having the appropriate performance indicators is very important. But acting on what those indicators are telling you is vital to sustaining and improving problem-solving capability at the business level.

A digital-ready board has the advantage of pulling enough resources and pushing the business model of technology, trustworthiness, working closely with the management by integrating multidisciplinary methodology to approach problems via multi-faceted way technically, scientifically and culturally.

Knowledge proficiency: As a senior leadership role, board directors should be the specialized generalists with “T” shaped expertise. Most of the board directors are top seasoned executives with years of experience. The T-shaped directors are in strong demand to bring the breadth of the business ecosystem or the across-industry perspective and the depth of the domain knowledge and expertise to the table. The vertical bar of the “T” represents depth in one field, the horizontal bar represents the ability to collaborate across other disciplines and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise. To reach the state of knowledge proficiency at the board level, it is important to identify and close the leadership gap between knowledge and insight, capture invaluable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions consistently. Forward-looking boards are looking for fresh knowledge and diverse experience for improving governance effectiveness. Collectively, the digital board with a blend of expertise and capabilities can foster a culture of innovation and improve boardroom digital readiness and leadership maturity.

Insight-driven: It is the paradigm shift from information scarcity in the industrial age to knowledge abundance in the digital era. At today’s digital dynamic, information is abundant and knowledge is only a click away. To quote Peter Drucker, knowledge is the most invaluable commodity. It couldn’t be truer in the digital era. On one hand, the fresh knowledge can be captured from the abundance of information; on the other hand, it doesn’t take long for that knowledge to become a commodity once the market is exposed to it. To reach the state of knowledge proficiency, it is also important to identify and close the gap between knowledge and insight, Boards directors shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge, but be able to capture the invaluable business insight to make sound judgments and effective decisions.

Information savvy: The Board's role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. Insightful boards not just crunch finance numbers but also get a new charter to focus on understanding more about KIDM - Knowledge-Information and Data Management. To gain business insight, the BoDs need to become information savvy and IT-friendly. The board directors may not be interested in data itself, but surely they would be interested in the "V" factor -VALUE it can bring to the table. "KIDM" improves measurably with analytics, as the speed, accuracy, and precision of the decision has a new level of importance and competitive value. So, an insightful board will leverage information and analytics to make strategic decisions effectively and steer the organization in the right direction.

The Board of Directors today needs to be knowledgeable, insightful, influential, strategic, and highly effective, and the board as a whole is able to create the cohesive vision, shape a holistic view, and transform from compliance-centric to performance-driven.