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.
Running Digital Organization as a Balanced System
A Digital Organization as an Organic System Digital means the exponential growth of information and an abundance of knowledge. The current business paradigm is still dominantly rooted in the mechanistic understanding and framing of hierarchical organizational structures or silo functions. The organization of the future will be organically developed, iterating and empowered by an intelligent organizational design that puts values and people before rules and roles. It will be organized as an organic system which is self-adapting, self-renewing, generates patterns, structures, business activities, and above all, creates novelty over time.
The Pervasive Digitization via Continuous Balance Cycles Over the last couple of decades, due to rapid changes and fierce competition, businesses have been faced with increasingly more complex and pressing problem-situations, embedded in interconnected business ecosystems operating in dynamically changing environments. The digital business cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of shaping a vision or mantra reflecting the “mind and soul” of the company to accelerate the pervasive digitization via continuous balance cycles of participation, adaptability, expansion, innovation, and optimization.
The Digital Organizational Design vs. Balance The purpose of organizational design is to improve the business maturity from functioning to firm to delight, and ultimately achieve the high-performance business result. High mature digital organizations integrate organizational design (OD) into the process design and organizational re-engineering for enabling employees to do their work productively and shape an interactive, dynamic, balanced, and multidimensional ecosystem.
The Hybrid Digital Management Disciplines The digital paradigm has many dimensions, it is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces, easy to get lost when trying to capture the big picture. 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 with a structural approach. Thus, digital management is a hybrid and holistic discipline with mixed management 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.
How to Strike the Multitude of Digital Balances for Achieving a State of Dynamic Equilibrium Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business both horizontally and vertically. Due to the “VUCA” nature of digitalization, change is unavoidable, firms that are skilled in managing digital dynamics can gain advantages in profitability, speed, business growth, and innovation enforcement. Organizations have to strike the multitude of digital balances that impact with each other in order to achieve such a state of dynamic equilibrium.
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