Sunday, March 24, 2019

Follow “LESS is More” Principle to Drive Digital Transformation

Digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a designated business competency to accomplish defined goals and manage a seamless digital continuum.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It represents a break from the past, with a high level of impact and complexity. It needs to take an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses for integrating both hard and soft critical business elements into differentiated organizational competency and follow the “Less is more” principle to improve, innovate, and harmonize for reaching the next level of the organizational maturity.




SeamLESS communication: The goal for making seamless communication is to ensure hierarchical systems adaptive so that they can respond to the challenges of a more complex, interconnected, and interdependent digital dynamic. However, in many organizations, miscommunication or misunderstanding is prevailing and leads to conflict and malfunction. Communication gaps are often caused by cognitive difference, internal politics, ambiguous process, mistrust culture or other management bottlenecks, etc. To close the gap and improve business effectiveness, the strategic communication initiated by top business leaders are not the top-down one-way street, but the multichannel means integrated with the feedback mechanism to enforce trust and improve accountability. Trust is built based on the evidence that varying business functions can communicate seamlessly and work closely to deliver optimal business solutions with optimal speed. Great leaders are great communicators who will pay attention to communication content, context, and style, tailor diverse audiences for delivering clear messages to harnessing trustful relationship and achieving common goals.

FlawLESS execution: With fast-paced changes, the exponential growth of information, and technology-led disruptions, many of today’s organizations are running in between - the mix of old and new; the different departments or divisions within an organization which operates at different speeds. Thus, managing the flawless execution is challenging due to a lack of synergy and synchronization. Statistically, strategy management in organizations has a very low success rate. Strategy execution fails not because of the bad strategy, but more often because of the flawed management disciplines such as misalignment or miscommunication and poor management disciplines of an otherwise a sound strategy. Business transformation often means you need to fine-tune the underlying organizational structures, optimize organizational processes to streamline business flow, break through the industrial constraints and limitations, to achieve operational excellence and managing flawless execution.

FrictionLESS collaboration: Digital breaks down functional borders, geographical borders, and even industrial borders. Organizations, like individuals, need to be in flow to operate smoothly and adapt to changes with less friction. In a high mature digital organization, every function in the company needs to work together cross-functional borders when necessary, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. The very obstacles to run a frictionless digital organization include thinking silo, functional silo, or management silo, etc. In fact, any kind of business frictions would decrease productivity, diminish innovation, or decelerate business speed. Digital platforms enabled by emerging technologies, efficient apps, and tools, help to lubricate processes, break down silos, flatter business hierarchies, allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge for co-solving problems and overcoming common challenges. In a frictionless digital workplace, dynamic business leaders, teams, and employees have a clarified vision to think with the long-term perspective, have a passion for catalyzing changes, and have unique competencies to drive a smooth digital transformation.

RelentLESS change: Digital transformation is more as a journey, not a destination, it could never end. Pushed by the waves of changes and continuous disruptions, organizations have to keep evolving, adapting, and innovating. They have to relentlessly improve their key business elements, emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that they will need to renew themselves periodically to cope with fast-paced changes effectively. Keep focus, and keep innovating. There should always, at every turn, be a taste of better days, of continual improvement of retrospective action planning, incremental goal achieving, and creative idea brainstorming. Going digital is a relentless journey with strong leadership, clear vision, implementable good strategy, diligent people, optimized processes, efficient technology, and differentiated business competencies.


EffortLESS state: Business transformation usually involves internalization of the internalized value or conceptual model, so that the newly required behaviors don't require the same kind of effort and vigilance for change. Ideally, digital transformation is a natural process and rather, effortless to maintain. Instead, the newly established behaviors will be in harmony with the internalized values and models. Being effortless doesn't mean just sitting back and merely responding passively. More accurately, it’s about how to strike the right balance to achieve such a state of effortless digital flow and dynamic balance. Business management should understand how to pull both hard and soft business elements together to build the differentiated business competency, and push for multiple solutions; take the time to look at every situation from multiple points, as well as pull all necessary business resources to develop innovative business resolutions.

Digital is the new age paradigm associated with deep ecology - the digital organization is more like the living things with self-adaptable and self-renewal capabilities. Going digital could be a beautiful journey by following the “Less is More” principle. You are motivated to move away from something because it is painful or outdated; also move towards something which is inspiring, advancing, and delightful. Digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as the means of getting to a designated business competency to accomplish a defined goal and manage a seamless digital continuum.

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