1. 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

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3. Title: Digitizing Boardroom
Sub Title: The Multifacted Aspects of Digital
Ready Boards
Author:
Pearl Zhu
ISBN: 978-1-483578835
Copyright Date:
Aug. 2016
About
“Digitizing Boardroom”

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Chapter 2 A Strategic Board
The 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.

7. 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.

8. Chapter 4 An Innovative Board
No 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.

9. Chapter 5 An IT Friendly Board
Information 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.

10. 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.

11. 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?

12. Chapter 8 A Culture-Savvy Board
The 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.

13. Conclusion
A 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.

14. Author: Pearl Zhu Digital is the Age of Innovation

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