As businesses and the world move deeper and deeper into the digital world of VUCA -volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, while company boundaries are blurred and the world is so hyper-connected, who leads whom? How can leaders make a positive influence and regain the trust of the society? How can they harness the creativity and passion of the workforce in pursuit of competitive advantage & unique difference in the global stage? What are the most important ingredients in great leadership?

1. Leadership is about the Future and Change
Digital Leadership
Substances & Styles
Pearl Zhu - The Author of “Digital Master - Debunk the Myths of Enterprise Maturity,”
“The Future of CIO” Blog

2. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Three “T”s in Transformational Leaders
Fundamentally there are two basic categories of leadership:
transactional and transformational. Transactional (some call
ordinary) managers keep their organizations on the
historical track, but transformational leaders (or some call
extraordinary) who inspire with vision, engage with teams,
focus on the significance of specific outcomes and new
ways to achieve the results.
● "TRANS" is derived from Latin and as a prefix means "across, on
the far side, and beyond." "trans" connotes a bridging characteristic.
Thus, transformational leaders practice forward-looking, future-
connecting thought leadership.
● Transcendence: Transformational leaders are transcendent, as
they are finding an appeal that can transcend unique leadership
differences.
● Transdisciplinarity is the ability to understand concepts across
multiple disciplines to connect and effectively move between divergent
knowledge disciplines.

3. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Three "C"s In Character-Based Leaders
The inspiring way to characterize the types
of leadership needs to dig deeper, hunt for
the character, look inside charisma, verify
the authenticity, as well as pursuit the
purpose.
● Courage is a crucial ingredient in character-based leaders, courage
is required at every step on the journey toward authenticity. As it takes
courage to break through barriers, prejudices, and difficulties.
● Consistence: Character-based leaders are also more consistent
with their thinking, saying, and doing, to become the authentic leaders
they were born to make.differences.
● Competence: Character and competency are two-sides of the
same leadership coin: as the character is based on who you are inside,
and competency comes from sharpening your strength, and practice
the leadership discipline with openness.

4. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “A”s in Adaptive Leaders
Adaptive leadership is given to impacting the environment.
It addresses a very active or proactive form of leadership,
not a passive effort taken merely to adjust to circumstances
as found.
● Agile: Adaptive leaders inspire cross-disciplined thinking, iterative
communication, and cross-functional collaboration, cultivate and
embrace the cognitive diversity that underpins adaptive organizations.
● Acceleration: Adaptive leaders need to develop platforms that
enable experimentation and learning, including opportunities to reflect
on successes and failures.
● Ability: To deal with complexity: An intellectual understanding of the
global business context—in other words, an ability to comprehend just
how complex it can be to do business around the world.

5. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “V”s in Visionary Leaders
The world becomes so dynamic and interconnected, the
business future turns to be so obscure and uncertain,
visionary leaders are needed to steer the future, as they
can zoom in the future as if it were closer.
● Value: Vision is not fashion, vision is filled with value. No matter
technology breakthrough or management innovation, visionary
leadership pulls the future together and pushes the human world
forward.
● Variety: Circular, not tunnel vision needs to be perceived via multi-
dimensional lenses. Visionary leaders transmit energy to a variety of
people, giving them a new sense of hope and confidence in achieving
the vivid and colorful vision with the positive frame.
● Versatility: Visionary leaders are optimistic realists to discover
versatility. They embody vitality, will, imagination, hope, and sense of
energy.

6. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “N”s in Nature Leaders
There are many key leadership ingredients which can be
nurtured, such as empathy, humility, influence. However,
there are raw (nature) leadership ingredients which come
from nature.
● Novelty: Nature leaders are both shapeable & shapeless, their
thoughts are deep as nature valley, their vision are also curvilinear;
they are out of box thinker, as nature is out of box, to dig through the
insight.
● Navigation Nature leaders follow both heart and mind, as nature is
their navigator, to connect dot in nature life path; nature leaders are
also dynamic, speed up and down, set back or bounce up, push & pull
accordingly.
● Nimbleness: In nature, everything is connected with something
else; but they also have such nature distance to keep all things in
harmony; nature is grand but also nimble, nature leaders follow the
spirit of nature to lead through.

7. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “P”s in Paradoxical Leaders
Leading complex digital organizations is a challenge that
requires paradoxical capabilities and behavioral complexity
and competencies that distinguish great leaders from
others.
● Positivity & Paranoid: Being positive and paranoid at the same
time makes interesting paradox-pair in sharpening contemporary
leadership. As being positive doesn’t mean you don’t consider and
calculate risk carefully; paradoxical leaders will well balance positive
pondering and paranoid wondering.
● Present & Perception: In today’s “VUCA” reality, what do you
see, and what can you perceive. As a paradoxical leader, you might
need to zoom out the “present” as if it were remote, in order to see it
holistically; that said, you should see both the trees and forest.
● Nimbleness: The power of pull is as “the ability to draw out people
and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.”
Push, on the other hand, relies on centralized control, conformity, and
top-down directives.

8. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “W”s in Wise Leaders
Knowledge tends to be linear, but wisdom is often
multidimensional. A wise mind is not full, but free; not about
cleverness, but about humbleness; not about system or
boxes, but about out-of-box; not about informativeness, but
about openness.
● Why: A wise leader leads via reflection: Wisdom is the full learning
cycle: learning, unlearning and relearning. If knowledge is gained from
learning, insight is captured from re-learning, and then wisdom is a full
set of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
● Weight: A wise leader does need the “gravity” in the heart or put the
“weight” in the mind. Leadership gravity means the humble attitude but
higher aptitude, be confident with humility, “down to the earth” with
flying thinking; forward-looking, and act wisely.
● Wordless: Think deeper, than just speak louder: A wise leader is a
good communicator, upon knowing when to voice out, when to keep
silent, think deeper before speak louder; use less words to express
more; and master of crowdsourcing and enjoying collective wisdom.

9. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “E”s in Effective Leaders
Perhaps “EFFECTIVENESS” is the most popular word to
describe leadership in positive way, though it seems to be
fundamental, doesn’t mean to be easier or tedious as an
effective leader.
● Evision: Effective leaders solve problems by creatively envisioning
different ways the world could and should be. With their imagination,
creativity, passion, and energy, they are the greatest creators of
widespread change in the world.
● Empathy: At today’s multi-generational, multicultural working
environment, an effective leader needs to understand how people
behave, what they desire and what their fears are, you have to not just
see through the eyes of someone who is different, but you have to think
through that person's brain. It's a mindset shift..
● Execution: An effective leader has to execute well, however,
execution doesn’t mean “just do it” blindly. Execution is the part of the
good business strategy, execution first starts with strategic focus and
leverage paradox.

10. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “I”s in Insight Leaders
If visionary leaders look on the horizon and take peek of
future, then insightful leaders look beyond to capture the
violet ray, or x-ray, to see underneath the surface; if
visionary leaders are able to zoom in the future as if it were
closer; and then insightful leaders are capable of pulling
past, present, and future together to pursue wisdom.
● Intelligence: Today’s management has been educated and
equipped with IQ (Rational Intelligence to make efficient commands) &
EQ (Emotional Intelligence to play the poker face). However, to
manage today’s uncertainty and complexity, multi-dimensional
intelligence are needed to shape insight.
● Inclusiveness: It is the quality of the organizational environment
that maximizes and leverages the diverse talents, backgrounds, and
perspectives of all employees.
● Influence: Leadership is an influence. Insightful leaders can make a
deep influence because their unique observation and clear discernment
can touch the heart, not only shape the mindset.

11. Digital Leadership Substances & Styles
Triple “S”s in Strategic Leaders
Statistically only 10% of leaders exhibit strategic skills,
Strategic Thinking is specified as being conceptual,
systems-oriented, directional, linking the future with the past
and opportunistic. It deals with "discovering novel, rewriting
the rules of the competitive game."
● Shape: A strategic leader examines the predictability, the extent to
which the future of the environment can be forecast, which depends on
the degree of complexity and dynamic change, in order to shape a
good strategy.
● Structure Structural Thinking is to connecting the dots of “What” &
“How.” A strategy is a roadmap of specific steps or actions that will take
you from your current state to your desired future state.
● Stretch: Strategic leaders act in ways that manage the tension
between well-done in daily tasks and success in the long term.
Stretching time horizons to give the short, medium, and long term each
its due.