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    Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit
    Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit
    Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit
    Ebook241 pages2 hours

    Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit

    By Pearl Zhu

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateSep 7, 2017
    ISBN9781387215560
    Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit

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      Book preview

      Digital Fit - Pearl Zhu

      Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit

      Digital Fit

      Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit

      Pearl Zhu

      Copyright @2017 Pearl Zhu

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means –whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic –without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punished by law.

      ISBN: 978-1-387-21556-0

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Fit

      Chapter 2 The Organizational Structure Fit

      Chapter 3 The Change Fit

      Chapter 4 The Knowledge Fit

      Chapter 5 The Talent Fit

      Conclusion

      Acknowledgement

      About the Author

      Introduction: The Organization’s Digital Fit

      The digital paradigm shift is inevitable. Keeping digital fit means the fitting mindset, fitting attitude, fitting structure, and fitting speed.

      Digital Fit.jpg

      Figure 1 Digital Fit Introduction

      The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and ability to adapt to changes. Either be a disrupter or being disrupted, the effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of the organization and making significant impacts on every aspect of the business from people, processes, to technology and capability both horizontally and vertically. 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.

      Chapter Intro.png

      Figure 2 The Digital Fit Chapter Introduction

      Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Fit: At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build an authentic culture and an engaging workforce. The best-fit mind means thinking differently, the best fit team has complementary skills and capabilities, and the best-fit organization has differentiated competency to achieve high-performing results.

      Chapter 2 Organizational Structure Fit: Increasingly, enterprises find themselves enmeshed in the digital eco-systems, whether they like it or not. For the most part, while they can influence and get influenced by these ecosystems, they have limited control over these ecosystems. Thus, they have to keep tuning the organizational structure to become digital fit and adapt to such a digital new normal accordingly.

      Chapter 3 Change Fit: Change is inevitable, and the speed of change is accelerating. However, adaptability and resourcefulness -the response to change are woefully underrated by businesses as keys to sustainability and success. Successful organizations see the changes coming and with pre-planning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. An organization is on the road to success when change is part of its nature.

      Chapter 4 Knowledge Fit: Business is going through a period of huge disruption due to the accelerating speed of changes and the emergent digital technologies. The business life cycle is significantly shortened. For many traditional organizations, they are not yet in the knowledge economy, they continue to act as expected in the economy of scarcity, presenting difficulties to share the insight and wisdom. Knowledge is without a doubt one of the most valuable and most poorly managed assets in business today. It is worthy of massive amounts of attention and resources.

      Chapter 5: Talent Fit: People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. Hiring the right person with the right capability for the right position at the right time, is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The right people make a positive influence on corporate culture and bring the wisdom to the workplace. The right people are the ones who possess the digital fit mind with knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors necessary to move your business in the direction it needs to go; help to realize the vision and values of the organization and keep innovating and transforming the business for the long-term prosperity.

      The term 'fit' can be interpreted with a degree of variability. At the business level, the digital fit is about operational excellence, high-innovativeness, high-effectiveness, and high-maturity. At the individual level, digital fit starts with digital mindsets and a set of digital skills and capabilities. Most of the organizations today are process and control driven, the emphasis is on compliance with the result people forget to think freely. ‘Fit' doesn't mean that everyone needs to have the same thought process, the same personalities, the same preferences, or the same experiences. Where you want to look for 'fit' is in relation to the values you want to build or maintain within your team, and the kinds of behaviors that you would expect to see as a result of, or in alignment with those values. What is important is that everyone feels committed to the goals of the team, and are comfortable with the behavioral expectations associated with those goals.

      Fit or Misfit is contextual. Organizational fit from conventional lenses makes relationships easy and perpetuates the status quo. So, if companies are satisfied with where they are and going then they should pay attention to fit. If things need to change then they need to quit hiring clones. Are you planning to build a homogeneous or heterogeneous team; a complimentary team or a competitive team? Organizations need to be thoughtful about whether they are hiring people who are an obvious fit, and passing on people who are less so, at least on the surface. Thought, skill, and experience diversity are what make effective innovation and growth possible, and you are selling short when you hire for homogeneity. Fit and diversity are not mutually exclusive. Just because two different people have different backgrounds, different approaches, and different opinions, it does not mean they can't be a good fit. Organizational fit means incluversity (inclusiveness + diversity), not about cookie cutting or hiring clones.

      The organizational fit is the good balance of the fitting attitude and misfit thinking. Ultimately, organizational fit means how to balance the fit (growth mindset, learning agility, good attitude and accepted behavior) and misfit (independent thinking and creativity). Organizational fit means more about value adding or behavioral norms. People need to be intentional about how they enter the role, focusing on understanding and respecting the people, culture, and history. The failure to do this is one of the biggest causes of derailment - and creator of the perception of poor-fit. The fit is also not equal to be compliant only, the ‘group think’ is, in fact, one of the most devastating factors to team performance and certainly to a team’s ability to innovate. Organizational fit, manifested in accepted and expected behavior, has a way of neutralizing differences. At today’s digital new normal, the culture fit means organizations need to proactively seek different ideas and engage in healthy debates and critical thinking with diverse points of view.

      The digital paradigm shift is inevitable. Keeping digital fit means the fitting mindset, fitting attitude, fitting structure, and fitting speed. It means learning agility, innovation, and balance. Run, grow, and transformation, digital organizations need to keep evolving, renewing, and achieving the state of digital flow and business continuum.

      Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Fit

      The organizational fit is the good balance of the fitting attitude and misfit thinking.

      Digital Characteristics.png

      Figure 3 Digital Characteristics

      Organizations today are hyperconnected and over-complex, with well mixed physical workplace and virtual team setting; multicultural, multi-generational and multidevicing workforce. To improve organizational digital fit, what're your team building principles? How do you define organizational fit, in order to build innovative and high-performing teams and transform the whole organization into the digital master?

      ●       Self-diagnoses your business personality: Like people, every organization has its own personality, often, an organization's personality replicates the personality of its leader, and that the personalities of the leadership drive the culture of the organization. Do you have an authentic organization that encourages its people to express and grow, or do you have a silo organization which has many gaps and is made of the sum of parts, not the whole? What are the collective thought processes and behaviors that you can see in your organization? A disconnected or distant layer of management or leadership? A sea of administrative bureaucracy? Silo thinking or poor or inconsistent communication down or across the organization? How would you describe the prevailing business mood? Lack of clarity or direction? Lack of teamwork? Lack of trust in management? Work overload? Unclear or rapidly changing priorities? Continual firefighting? Ambivalence? What are the contributing environmental factors and behaviors? Slow or unclear priorities, strategies or decision processes?  A lack of recognition or honest feedback or a disconnect between recognition and performance? What are the needed changes in behavior, process, communication, accessibility, engagement, approach? Do you inspire open conversations about work environment? etc.

      ●       Reimagine the fundamentals of how organizations work: At the age of digital, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build an authentic culture and an engaging workforce. There are differences between work environment (business mood) and company culture. The work environment is floating on the surface, easy to see, feel, or measure, it is also relatively easy to change - even in days or weeks. Anyone in the organization can begin to change their work environment! But work culture is how people think and do things here, it is the collective mindset and attitude. A company's culture, which is heavily ingrained and implicit and not directly perceptible, is also very hard to change and changes slowly if at all. Top leadership team often owns and makes a huge impact on business culture. Also, the reality is that the organizational structures and relationships with and between employees were designed for a very different age. It's not just a leadership or management issue; most organizations are grossly dysfunctional, despite often noble attempts at change by the leadership team. And because organizations look to and talk about and mimic their organizational managers and leaders, it is these groups (particularly the first line/middle-level managers) that have a lot of power to influence the environment quickly and substantially. To reimagine business, reinvent business culture, and reshape the way of doing things, leveraging the latest technologies to digitize business processes and fine-tune business culture can improve your business fitness for the paradigm shift.

      ●       Talent fitness and team fitness: Talent development is a continuous effort to groom the right talent for the business’s long-term prosperity. Employee development plan should be done with employees and not against them. Talent acquisition includes people and skills development, aligning people to organizational vision and values, succession planning, engagement and retention strategies through enlightened leadership and management practices. You need both best fit employees and high-performing teams. Sometimes, it’s not easy to bring all talented people and mold them into an effective team, and there's more to it than what you might think about, but bringing the best together successfully can be done and has been done many times before if you have a growth mind to truly understand digital fitness, and build a long-term talent strategy to achieve it. Either at the individual, team, or organizational level, digital fitness doesn’t mean to set the cookie-cutting standard to ensure that everyone thinks and acts the same. So, the best an organization can do is to hire someone with the potential to fit with positive attitude, but be cautious of too fit on the surface, build complementary team with cognitive difference and diversified skills and experiences, and then support the process of wiring them to the role and company in order to shape high-performance digital workforces to competing for the future.

      Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades and intensity. Being digital, not just doing digital; digital maturity matters, it’s the core shift in how the business operates, the philosophy and methodology, the leadership and strategy; the mindset and culture. Indeed, the best-fit mind means think differently, the best fit team has complementary skills and capabilities, and the best-fit organization has differentiated competency to achieve a high-performing result.

      1 The Autonomy of the Digital Organization

      Autonomy becomes one of the most critical characteristics for digital organizations to thrive as well as the symbol of achieving high-level digital maturity.

      Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. The new paradigm that is emerging is a digital organization that is more responsive, holistic, vibrant, self-driving, innovative, and above all enhances and nurtures the living organization. In fact, autonomy becomes one of the most critical characteristics for digital organizations to thrive as well as the symbol of achieving high-level digital maturity.

      ●       Self-adaptation Digital is all about the exponential growth of information and rapid speed of changes. Therefore, today’s digital organizations need to be self-adaptive to the dynamic environment. The business responsiveness and changeability based on self-adaptation are the capabilities to adapt to the change and make conscious business choices seamlessly. Organizations are made by people and people are the key element in self-adaptive organisms of today's digital organization. Because self-adaptation is a phenomenon strictly linked to see learning and knowledge increases if shared and consumed. To put another way, learning agility is the prerequisite to becoming self-adaptive, without growth mindset and update knowledge, either individual or the organization will get stuck and cannot reach the next level of the growth cycle. At the organizational level, self-adaptation is faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational change, starting from relations between people. Digital means continuous disruptions and

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