Digitizing Board

The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards

Pearl Zhu

The Author of “Digital Master” Book Series & “Future of CIO” Blog

WWW.PEARLZHU.COM CIO MASTER Digital Agility

DIGITAL MASTER

D I PG EI AT RA LL

M A ZS HT UER

Title: Digitizing BoardroomSub Title: The Multifacted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards

Author:Pearl Zhu

ISBN: 978-1-483578835

Copyright Date:Aug. 2016

About “Digitizing Boardroom”

Summary Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses toward the right direction and achieve expected business results. The main purpose of “Digitizing Boardrooms -The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Board” is to:

● Envision the future of directorship with twenty three digital boardroom themes.

● Oversee business strategies with digital fluidity, digital mindset, and contextual intelligence.

● Make policies and effective decisions on transforming boards from conformance to performance driven.

● Rejuvenate boardrooms via participating in both innovation management and management innovation.

● Highlight the importance of building IT friendly and technology-savvy digital boards.

● Develop the best and next governance practices towards achieving corporate excellence.

● Advocate digital fitness and innovate people management to become “Talent Master.”

● Set digital culture tones, and fine tune processes to make boards highly effective and highly mature.

Chapter 1 The Digital Themes of Boardroom

Envision the Future of Directorship

The Board plays a crucial role in setting business leadership tones and driving the organization’s digital transformation. Digitizing Boardroom 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 BoardThe board plays a critical role in overseeing

business strategies, it is important to keep the

board strategically focused.

A digital board not only oversees strategy but

also influences the process as well. The process

of strategic planning is the best indicator of how

well a board really understands and invests time

in learning about their companies and also

identifies the levels of collaboration, synergy,

trust and confidence that exist between the board

and executives of the organization.

.

Chapter 3 A Performance-Driven Board 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 BoardNo 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. It needs to align innovation strategy with key ingredients of management innovation, , such as the development of an innovative culture or business eco-system.

Chapter 5 An IT Friendly BoardInformation is the lifeblood and one of the most invaluable assets in digital businesses today, technology is the disruptive force behind digital transformation. IT is the business catalyst. More often than not, IT directly impacts on strategy shaping. Therefore, Digital BoDs need to become more information savvy and technology smart.

The foremost thing for BoD is to realize that IT is strategic; and as such, it should be a distinct part of the business strategy telling how to maintain compliant and secure and how to enable business growth.

Chapter 6 A “Governance-Champion Board

Business governance is the other important responsibility of the corporate board. Governance is a sophisticated process that if well executed, will lead to better decisions.

It will allow not only to protect the existing value but also to create new value for its shareholders. With increasing speed of changes and digital velocity, the best practices of Boardrooms are also need to be updated.

Chapter 7 A “Talent Master” Board

People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. Digitalization and globalization have huge impact in the business world, and talent has become the defining theme of this new digital paradigm. “Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations

The question is: The Board as a top leadership team to oversee strategy and innovate people management, how can you set good policies to value people in multidimensional ways?

Chapter 8 A Culture-Savvy BoardThe board has to pay more attention to the culture, which will "eat the strategy" otherwise. The company needs to determine its direction, and then assure that the culture supports the strategy. The board as a top-level leadership team should set the tune to build a culture of learning and innovation.

When culture is inspired at the board level, it can unlock powerful synergies that drive performance, especially in today's hyper-connected digital world that relies so much on collaboration and teamwork.

ConclusionA Digital Ready Board is high- effective, high- performing, high- innovative, and high- mature.

● Oversee business strategy.

● Monitor business performance

● Empower IT and inspire innovation

● Enforce governance

● Set Tone for corporate culture.

Author: Pearl Zhu Digital is the Age of Innovation

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