Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões (parte III)

Continuado daqui e daqui.

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Quando os macro-economistas falam sobre o desempenho, sobre a produtividade de um sector de actividade, como o calçado, como o têxtil, como o mobiliário, falam de um bloco homogéneo, coerente, maciço... como se todas as empresas, imersas no mesmo ambiente competitivo, tivessem o mesmo comportamento
O segundo capítulo do livro "How We Compete - What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make it in Today's Global Economy" de Suzanne Berger e o MIT Industrial Performance Center começa com esta citação:

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"When reports about the impact of globalization start from the macro picture of pressures toward a single world market, they usually predict that companies competing under the same constraints around the world will have to imitate the successful models. (Moi ici: ainda vamos voltar a esta estória dos modelos únicos) If that's the case, they would end up looking much the same, as they converged on a set of common organizational patterns and best practices.

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But that is not at all what we discovered in our interviews. On the contrary, because we started at the micro level - from experiences we have analyzed in hundreds of companies competing in the same markets - and traced out their evolution, we found great and lasting diversity." (Moi ici: o contacto com a realidade da micro-economia, com pessoas que arriscam, com pessoas que desenvolvem relações amorosas com clientes, produtos e fornecedores, com pessoas que têm uma fé num optimismo não documentado)
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Voltando ao livro "Job Creation and Destruction" de Steven Davis, John Haltiwanger e Scott Schuh, sobre a heterogeneidade de cada sector industrial encontramos:

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"The magnitude of within-sector heterogeneity implies that idiosyncratic factors dominate the determination of which plants create and destroy jobs, and which plants achieve rapid productivity growth or suffer productivity declines.

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One likely reason for heterogeneity in plant-level outcomes is the considerable uncertainty that surrounds the development, adoption, distribution, marketing, and regulation of new products and production techniques. Uncertainty about the demand for new produccts or the cost-effectiveness of alternative technologies encourages firms to experiment with different technologies, goods, and production facilities. Experimentation, in turn, generates differences in outcomes. Even when motives for experimentation are absent, uncertainty about future cost or demand conditions encourages firms to differentiate their choice of current products and technology so as to position themselves optimally for possible future circumstances.

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Another likely reason is that differences in entrepreneurial and managerial ability lead to differences in job and productivity growth rates among firms and plants. These differences include the ability to identify and develop new products, the ability to organize production activity, the ability to motivate workers, and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. There seems to be little doubt that these and other ability differences among managers generate much of the observed heterogeneity in plant-level outcomes.

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sources of heterogeneity among seemingly similar businesses underscore the remarkable complexity of economic growth and change. They underscore the continuous, large-scale job creation and destruction activity required to allocate resources toward their highest value uses. And they underscore the extremely limited degree to which the precise patterns of job creation and destruction can be explained in terms of business characteristics that are easily observable to economists and policymakers. Indeed, the current state of economic science provides little knowledge about the relative importance of various idiosyncratic factors or the precise reasons why they generate such tremendous heterogeneity in outcomes.

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(Moi ici: se o desempenho das empresas num sector depende, sobretudo, de factores idiossincráticos... então, o que pensar das leis voluntaristas para, supostamente, criar ou salvar empregos?)

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The predominant role of idiosyncratic factors in job creation and destruction, and our highly incomplete understanding of these factors, incline us toward a prudent stance regarding economic policy interventions intended to create more or better jobs. Absent an understanding of which factors drive employer decisions about job creation and destruction, policy interventions may impede the allocation of workers and other inputs to their highest value uses."

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E quando os políticos se auto-nomeiam, sem qualquer experiência profissional, em grandes augures, qual Vitorino no último Prós e Contras, capazes de ler o futuro e saber quais as experiências que têm futuro.

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Em comentário no twitter na altura escrevi com ironia "O Estado é que sabe qual o futuro"... alguém comentou "Prefiro estar na "mão" do Estado do que na de um privado, gostos"

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Os privados, individualmente, não têm mais capacidade do que o Estado para fazer escolhas. Só que no agregado, os privados têm uma larga vantagem sobre o Estado, como são muitos, têm mais hipóteses de alguns acertarem. É a velha citação de Hamel acerca da resiliência da Vida no planeta Terra:

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"Life is the most resilient thing on the planet. I has survived meteor showers, seismic upheavals, and radical climate shifts. And yet it does not plan, it does not forecast, and, except when manifested in human beings, it possesses no foresight. So what is the essential thing that life teaches us about resilience?

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Just this: Variety matters. Genetic variety, within and across species, is nature's insurance policy against the unexpected. A high degree of biological diversity ensures that no matter what particular future unfolds, there will be at least some organisms that are well-suited to the new circumstances."

Poema de Gary Hamel e Liisa Valikangas em "The quest for resilience", Harvard Business Review, Setembro de 2003

Continua.