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    Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift
    Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift
    Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift
    Ebook234 pages3 hours

    Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift

    By Pearl Zhu

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    About this ebook

    The digital transformation makes a significant impact on almost every aspect of the business from people; process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. It does make a smaller world, but also makes businesses and the world super complex and full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Companies across the sectors have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive economic dynamic.

    The purpose of the book “Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift” is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateAug 4, 2018
    ISBN9780359000661
    Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift

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      Book preview

      Digital Hybridity - Pearl Zhu

      Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift

      Digital Hybridity

      How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift

      Pearl Zhu

      Copyright @2018 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: 978-0-359-00066-1 (SC)

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 The Hybrid Digital Organization

      Chapter 2 The Portmanteau Words to Reflect Digital Reality

      Chapter 3 The Hybrid Thinking

      Chapter 4 The Hybrid Digital Management

      Chapter 5 The Hybrid Workforce Management

      Acknowledgment

      About the Author

      Introduction: The Hybrid View of Digital Paradigm Shift

      The change from one era to another is often called PARADIGM SHIFT.

      Figure 1 The Digital Hybridity Introduction

      We are experiencing the major societal transformation from the industrial machine age with information scarcity to the digital era with information/knowledge/innovation abundance. The digital paradigm shift is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part, the environments in which we live, and the way how we perceive the multipolar digital world.

      The digital transformation makes a significant impact on almost every aspect of the business from people; process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. It does make a smaller world, but also makes businesses and the world super complex and full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Companies across the sectors have huge pressures to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive economic dynamic.

      The purpose of the book "Digital Hybridity: How to Strike the Right Balance for Digital Paradigm Shift" is to shed some light on how to strike the right balance of stability and changes; being transactional to keep spinning and being transformational to leap forward for making a seamless digital paradigm shift. Digital organizations should apply the hybrid management approach, focus on building a diverse, networked, and extended modern working environment in which the powerful digital platforms and computing technologies enable seamless conversations, delayer overly rigid organizational hierarchy, inspire idea sharing and brainstorming, and engage employees and partners to achieve the high-performance result.

      Chapter 1 The Hybrid Digital Organization: With the fast pace of change and emerging digital technologies such as social, mobile and cloud computing, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, the next wave of digital changes, and the next step of business movement. They need to figure out how to take advantage of the new digital platforms and tools, strike the right balance of physical assets and virtual platforms, improve productivity, encourage creativity, and enforce collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem.

      Chapter 2 The Portmanteau Words to Reflect Digital Reality: Digitalization doesn’t mean to just tear down all the old things in the previous era. In reality, it means how to strike the right balance between the new way and the old way. Being hybrid means to take balance as a management philosophy. In order to make a solid digital transformation, there are many seemly paradoxical, but indeed coherent elements in running a high-effective business today. Organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances which impact with each other in order to achieve such a state of dynamic equilibrium.

      Chapter 3 The Hybrid Thinking: We live in the digital world with all sorts of hybrid solutions. Digital leaders and professionals need to leverage Hybrid Thinking which is a set of interdisciplinary and integrative thought processes to solve many of today’s complex problems that require strategic consideration, systems intelligence, innovative approaches, as well as cross-cultural and cross-generational perspectives.

      Chapter 4 The Hybrid Digital Management: Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by conflict, out of balance, and lack of logic. It has to expand into every dimension of the organization by taking a structural approach. Digital management is a hybrid and holistic discipline with mixed styles for managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working such as cross-functional communication and collaboration, organizational structure design, change management, talent development, digital business readiness, and stakeholder management, etc.

      Chapter 5 The Hybrid Workforce Management: Many company workforce spans three or even four generations - Baby Boomers, Generation X, Y (Millennial) and Z. Each with different leadership, thinking, communication, working, and learning styles. At the dawn of the digital era, global businesses need to shed the tendency to bridge the generational differences and shape the cross-generational mindset with common digital traits and perceive a diverse, dynamic, and complete picture of their workforce.

      The hybrid digital view has many dimensions such as socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economical, organizational, scientific, or philosophical, just to name a few. A worldview is like a lens through which we perceive the landscape of life that becomes our reality. These dimensions of lens interact and mutually influence each other.  Those who look through the lens of the previous era see their own reality very differently from those who use the lens that the new digital era has crafted.  Digitalization means flow - energy flow, information flow, idea flow, mind flow and ultimately business flow, so the view of the world needs to become more dynamic, adjustable, colorful, and multidimensional.

      Chapter 1 The Hybrid Digital Organization

      The challenge of digitalization is to have a harmonized vision and build a customized structure to enforce open communication and collaboration.

      Figure 2 The Hybrid Digital Organization

      With the fast pace of change and emerging digital technologies such as social, mobile and cloud computing, companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, the next wave of digital changes, and the next step of business movement. They need to figure out how to take advantage of the new digital platforms and tools, strike the right balance of physical and virtual, improve productivity, encourage creativity, and enforce collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem.

      ●       Hierarchical structures will be transcended to the interconnected and network structure: Look at all the elements, including the human element, as an integrated system and functions as an organic living thing. 'Individual' work and 'group' work cannot be done as a segregated form but within a 'framework' of an entire business ecosystems which include systems, processes, policies, culture, work climates, customers, supply-side chain, society, laws, etc, an integration of across global business, social and, political systems.

      ●       The balance of a physical and virtual world: The challenge facing business management will continue to be: 'How to achieve the balance between virtual worlds and human connection. A hybrid nature of organization well mixes the virtual social platform with the physical functional structure to enforce cross-functional collaboration and dot-connecting innovation. The impact of emerging digital technology is right on - the future of the organization will become more ‘virtual’ and the virtual organizational design expertise will become critical in the coming years. But deep human connection may still be critical, and the connection is not only just about physical touch but more importantly, as an emotional connection. While technology provides new frontiers for work systems, there are also challenges with issues of human 'connectivity.' What's intended to bring us closer together may leave us feeling further apart.

      ●       The organizational democracy: Organizational democracy will begin to become a fundamental management practice to update the hierarchical command-control systems. Organizational design needs to well reflect leadership competency; democratic processes will overtake hierarchical control, and culture will become a fundamental organizational asset through the impact of digital technology. The key is to improve business agility and enhance cohesive business capabilities. Functions that need business agility and customer intimacy can be decentralized and perhaps even embedded in business processes. Functions that are common to the enterprise or commodity services can be centralized to derive scale benefits. That said, the lower you go on the technology stack, the more it makes sense to centralize. The functions closest to the business are best federated. Where the line crosses is driven by the complexity of the business model.

      ●       Develop a hybrid, networked, and extended modern working environment: The emergent organizational models will integrate with social process models through both structured and unstructured social processes. Chaos theories and the complex adaptive system will integrate with developmental processes. It’s a hybrid, networked, and extended modern working environment, the digital computing technology enables seamlessly virtual platforms, engage customers and partners to voice concerns and feedbacks, and encourage the broader conversations and interactions within its business ecosystem and social value chain. But the supportive leadership has always been the basic premise of the organizational models. It's a matter of getting senior leadership to buy into the next digital practice. This is a strong point of costs reduction and optimization of the technologies; in other words, it provides economies of all kind of resources (material and human) that goes straight to ROI.

      The challenge of digitalization is to have a harmonized vision about overall business capabilities and maturities in an organization and build a customized structure to enforce open communication and collaboration. A hybrid organizational structure can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, processes, people dynamics, technology, resource allocation, supply-side variables, market variables, and economies of scale, etc. People are the focal point of any organizational design; the purpose of building the tailored hybrid organization is on the deliverable quality, to improve business productivity and agility, to delight customers and engage employees, and to encourage innovation and optimization.

      1 Three Hybrid Elements in Running a Digital Organization

      A hybrid organizational structure can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, processes, people dynamics, technology, and resource allocation, etc.

      With emergent digital technologies, organizations large or small reinvent themselves to become more agile, flexible and innovative. Digitalization doesn’t mean to just tear down all the old things in the previous era; in reality, digitalization means how to strike the right balance between the new way and the old way - the physical building and the virtual platform, the face-to-face communication and the always-on online presence. Here are three hybrid elements in running a digital organization. 

      ●       The hybrid decision-making style: Digital businesses are hyper-connected and over-complex, with overloading information, unprecedented uncertainty, and continually evolving in the digital dynamic ecosystem. Hence, it’s much more difficult to make effective decisions with the traditional top-down classic management style. Decision agility is dependent on better access to right information, at the right time - but also access to the right people. Using the traditional ways of working in the silos and through the rigid processes simply won't have enough time to produce the input for decision makers. More often than not, you need to allow a 'bottom-up' approach to collect sufficient information and leverage collective wisdom. And then, you can proceed to environmental, organizational, and sociological factors that define the environment in which decisions are made. Each of these opens the door to a variety of views. Without proper data or other input, no good decisions can be made. Business managers have to live with the consequences of making the wrong decisions faster! Taking the hybrid styles to make the leadership team's thinking visible by using a democratic process of decision making will dramatically reduce or eliminate digital gaps. In complex operations and organizations, group dynamics lead to final results and performance, especially if the involvement of the activity is related to group inputs and processing!

      ●       The hybrid innovation management style: Hybridity is the digital fit style for managing innovation because a balanced digital innovation portfolio includes incremental or efficiency driven innovations, as well as radical and breakthrough innovations. Although all innovations are disruptive of something or some behavior to some degree, from a portfolio management point of view, companies need both incremental product/service innovations to thrive but also desire large or disruptive innovations for a quantum leap. Managing innovation requires leaders, either formal or informal, to shepherd an idea through several phases of development, knowing when to move forward and when to return to an earlier phase. It is hard to think of any innovation as not a hybrid combination of something old with something new or a number of new things. Innovations in the digital age are coming at seemingly much faster paces, more change, more potential disruptions, but the patterns and rules of communication are pretty much the same. You could consider all innovation by hybridized in that sense. Precisely, that’s why it is an orthogonal concept to disruption. The broader the scope, scale, and impact of the change, the more one leans towards calling such change an innovation.

      ●       The hybrid organizational structure and management: Organizational structure underpins business processes, business processes underpin organizational capability, and organizational capabilities underpin strategy execution. With emergent enterprise social platform and the variety of collaboration tools, the impact of digital technology is right on- that the future of the organization will become more ‘virtual.’ Businesses also need to fine-tune their business structure and organizational system concentrated on the cultural system, moral system, social system, material system, functional system and the holistic digital

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