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Os encalhados (aqui, aqui, aqui e aqui só nos últimos dias), os que ainda não viram a luz na estrada para Damasco, propõem a receita antiga, a receita em que foram doutrinados quando andavam na universidade.
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No entanto, esquecem que toda e qualquer estratégia é situacional e, por isso, transitória.
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"you have to face up to the inevitability of strategy decay.
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Strategies decay for four reasons. Over time they get replicated; they lose their distinctiveness and, therefore, their power to produce above-average returns.
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Good strategies also get supplanted by better strategies.
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Strategies get exhausted as markets become saturated, customers get bored, or optimization programs reach the point of diminishing returns.
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Finally, strategies get eviscerated. The Internet may not have changed everything, but it has dramatically accelerated the migration of power from producers to consumers. Customers are using their newfound power like a knife, carving big chunks out of once-fat margins."
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Assim, a estratégia que resultava no tempo em que os encalhados andavam na escola e em que a procura era maior do que a oferta acabou, pelo menos para este país.
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Quando comparamos os custos laborais em Portugal com os de outros países, como se pode ver neste quadro:
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E, seguindo os ensinamentos de Bruce Greenwald e Judd Kahn em "Competition Demystified - A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy" (que mencionei aqui) o melhor que há a fazer é reconhecer a incapacidade de competir pelos custos e abandonar o piquenique com estilo, para procurar outras paragens, outras estratégias onde possamos ser competitivos.
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Podemos descrever o universo competitivo das empresas como se fossem paisagens competitivas:
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"Fitness landscapes deform in response to changes in the abiotic environment and in response to coevolution. In coevolutionary processes, the fitness of one organism or species depends upon the characteristics of the other organisms or species with which it interacts, while all simultaneously adapt and change" (Moi ici: Este trecho é retirado de "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" de Stuart Kauffman. Conseguem imaginar uma paisagem com picos e vales?
Conseguem imaginar que esses picos podem crescer e transformar-se em montanhas, ou podem diminuir até voltarem a ser parte do vale, Conseguem imaginar que de repente uma pequena área do vale emerge e transforma-se num pico. Sobre esta paisagem nascem, vivem e morrem organismos-empresas. Quanto mais elevado estiverem maior o seu sucesso, longas temporadas no vale levam à morte desses organismos-empresas. Recordo aqui também Lindgren e as suas experiências virtuais simulando a vida das estratégias.)
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As estratégias que resultam num dado momento são função do estado do meio abiótico e dos estados dos organismos presentes em interacção. Mudando o estado do meio e mudando os estados dos organismos em interacção, surgem condições que facilitam novas estratégias e condenam as anteriormente bem sucedidas. É o velho: "É a vida!"
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Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient. The evidence is all around us. Big companies are failing more frequently.
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In less turbulent times, established companies could rely on the flywheel of momentum to sustain their success.
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The fact that success has become less persistent strongly suggests that momentum is not the force it once was.
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In the past, executives had the luxury of assuming that business models were more or less immortal. Companies always had to work to get better, of course, but they seldom had to get different — not at their core, not in their essence. Today, getting different is the imperative"
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Quais são as novas estratégias que vão ter sucesso? Não podemos à priori saber, não podemos cometer este erro-socialista de palmatória de acreditar que se sabe mais do que o mercado na sua variedade de escolhas.
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"Just as biology can teach us something about variety, markets can teach us something about what it takes to liberate resources from the prison of precedent. The evidence of the past century leaves little room for doubt: Market-based economies outperform those that are centrally planned. It’s not that markets are infallible. Like human beings, they are vulnerable to mania and despair. But, on average, markets are better than hierarchies at getting the right resources behind the right opportunities at the right time. Unlike hierarchies, markets are apolitical and unsentimental; they don’t care whose ox gets gored. (Moi ici: O dinheiro que se tem torrado em Srs dos Perdões, Qimondas e Aerosoles, sempre dinheiro perdido por que se trata de uma tentativa de salvar o passado, um passado que já não se ajusta a um novo mundo. E aquele grito "Espanha! Espanha! Espanha!" é um bom exemplo da incapacidade das hieraquias para alocarem recursos) The average company, though, operates more like a socialist state than an unfettered market. A hierarchy may be an effective mechanism for applying resources, but it is an imperfect device for allocating resources. Specifically, the market for capital and talent that exists within companies is a whole lot less efficient than the market for talent and capital that exists between companies.
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In fact, a company can be operationally efficient and strategically inefficient. (Moi ici: Por favor voltar atrás e reler... e passar aos encalhados) It can maximize the efficiency of its existing programs and processes and yet fail to find and fund the unconventional ideas and initiatives that might yield an even higher return. While companies have many ways of assessing operational efficiency, most firms are clueless when it comes to strategic efficiency. (Moi ici: Assim como os encalhados, só conhecem um pedal, só conhecem um caminho... perderam a plasticidade mental para equacionar outras alternativas novas? Ou nunca chegaram a cultivar essa propriedade?) How can corporate leaders be sure that the current set of initiatives represents the highest value use of talent and capital if the company hasn’t generated and examined a large population of alternatives? And how can executives be certain that the right resources are lined up behind the right opportunities if capital and talent aren’t free to move to high-return projects or businesses? The simple answer is, they can’t." (Moi ici: Reconhecer isto deve ser um trauma para os caviares e socialistas)
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A única forma de saber é tentar, é experimentar:
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"The isolation—and distrust—of strategic experimentation is a leftover from the industrial age, when variety was often seen as the enemy.
A variance, whether from a quality standard, a production schedule, or a budget, was viewed as a bad thing—which it often was. But in many companies, the aversion to unplanned variability has metastasized into a general antipathy toward the nonconforming and the deviant.
This infatuation with conformance severely hinders the quest for resilience. (Moi ici: Esta é uma grande crítica que pode ser feita aos sistemas da qualidade. Estão tão concentrados na conformidade que fazem esquecer, ou sufocar, a experimentação. Pregam tanto a normalização que proscrevem a diferença, a novidade. Confundem variabilidade com variedade. Acredito que se trata de mais uma Torre de Babel, e as sucessivas recolhas de automóveis de todas as marcas em todos os continentes são, para mim, uma consequência da redução da diversidade e variedade de cabeças pensante e fornecedores na cadeia de valor do automóvel)
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The final barrier to resilience is ideological. The modern corporation is a shrine to a single, 100-year-old ideal - optimization. From “scientific management” to “operations research” to “reengineering” to “enterprise resource planning” to “Six Sigma,” the goal has never changed: Do more, better, faster, and cheaper.
Make no mistake, the ideology of optimization, and its elaboration into values, metrics, and processes, has created enormous material wealth. The ability to produce millions of gadgets, handle millions of transactions, or deliver a service to millions of customers is one of the most impressive achievements of humankind.
But it is no longer enough.
The creed of optimization is perfectly summed up by McDonald’s in its famous slogan, “Billions Served.” The problem comes when some of those billions want to be served something else, something different, something new. (Moi ici: Esta é a chave para aprender a competir no novo mundo, no planeta Mongo. Já não é uma luta pela uniformização homogeneizadora mas uma explosão de variedade luxuriante. Já não de mega-empresas multinacionais imperiais, mas de empresas rápidas, flexíveis, próximas e amigáveis)
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As an ideal, optimization is sufficient only as long as there’s no fundamental change in what has to be optimized. But if you work for a record company that needs to find a profitable on-line business model, or for an airline struggling to outmaneuver Southwest, or for a hospital trying to deliver quality care despite drastic budget cuts, or for a department store chain getting pummeled by discount retailers, or for an impoverished school district intent on curbing its dropout rate, or for any other organization where more of the same is no longer enough, then optimization is a wholly inadequate ideal.
An accelerating pace of change demands an accelerating pace of strategic evolution, which can be achieved only if a company cares as much about resilience as it does about optimization.
This is currently not the case.
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It’s not that optimization is wrong; it’s that it so seldom has to defend itself against an equally muscular rival. Diligence, focus, and exactitude are reinforced every day, in a hundred ways—through training programs, benchmarking,improvement routines, and measurement systems. But where is the reinforcement for strategic variety, wide-scale experimentation, and rapid resource redeployment?"
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Trechos retirados de "The Quest for Resilience" de Gary Hamel e Liisa Valikangas.
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E voltando à figura:
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Continua
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