O lucro, tal como o emprego, não é um objectivo, é uma consequência!

Max Planck dizia que a ciência avança funeral atrás de funeral, ou seja, à medida que os defensores das velhas ideias morrem e deixam as suas cátedras e outros locais de influência.
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Nassim Taleb em "Antifragile" chama a atenção para onde estão as fronteiras do conhecimento:

"The error of naive rationalism leads to overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, academic knowledge, in human affairs—and degrading the uncodifiable, more complex, intuitive, or experience-based type.
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the Baconian linear model, after the philosopher of science Francis Bacon; I am adapting its representation by the scientist Terence Kealey (who, crucially, as a biochemist, is a practicing scientist, not a historian of science) as follows:
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Academia → Applied Science and Technology → Practice
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While this model may be valid in some very narrow (but highly advertised instances), such as building the atomic bomb, the exact reverse seems to be true in most of the domains I’ve examined.
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So we are blind to the possibility of the alternative process, or the role of such a process, a loop:
Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship → Random Tinkering (antifragile) → Heuristics (technology) → Practice and Apprenticeship …
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In parallel to the above loop,
Practice → Academic Theories → Academic Theories → Academic Theories → Academic Theories …
(with of course some exceptions, some accidental leaks, though these are indeed rare and overhyped and grossly generalized)."

Primeiro vêm a prática, só depois as teorias académicas.
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Por isso, tantas vezes me interroguei aqui sobre o porquê da cegueira da tríade (não confundir com a troika)
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O mundo muda, quem está no terreno, os pragmáticos, os práticos, têm de arranjar novas formas de lidar com a nova realidade com que deparam. Muitas tentativas iniciais falham até que uma ou mais novas abordagens resultam e começam a generalizar-se entre a comunidade de práticos. Entretanto, os teóricos continuam a pensar e a enformar novas gerações a pensarem sobre como lidar com o mundo antigo que já desapareceu.
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Assim, não é de admirar esta previsão:

"So here’s my wager on how long it will take for what even Jack Welch sees as ‘the world’s dumbest idea’, i.e. maximizing shareholder value, to become the minority view:
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“Major thought leaders: end 2014.
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All major businesses and business schools: 2020.”"

Depois, esta sequência é muito rica:

"In fact, shareholder value is part of a web of obsolete management ideas that no longer fit the 21st Century. As I noted in an article last week, other once-sacred and self-evident truths are also falling by the wayside:

• The search for the holy grail of strategy—sustainable competitive advantage—is recognized by Professor Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School as futile: competitive advantage is at best temporary. (Moi ici: Claro que muitos dirão que isto é perigosa propaganda neoliberal)

• The “essence of strategy” seen as “coping with competition”, as argued by legendary guru Professor Michael Porter, is now obsolete: the essence of strategy is about adding value to customers.

• It transpires that the raison d’être of a firm is not only, as Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase argued, because it can reduce transaction costs, but also because it can add value for customers.

• The uni-directional value chain—the very core of 20th Century management thinking (Moi ici: Aqui a tríade está tão atrasada... ainda pensa na produção sem pensar na relação com os clientes, sem pensar no ecossistema da procura) developed by Professor Porter—is being replaced by the concept of multi-directional networks, in which interactions with customers play a key role.

• The extraordinarily generous compensation afforded to senior executives is recognized in an HBR article by Professor Mihir Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School to be a giant “financial incentives bubble”, accompanied by an unjustified sense of entitlement.

• The short-term gains of large-scale off-shoring of manufacturing are recognized to have caused massive loss of competitive capacity: new heuristics for outsourcing have emerged.

• Supposed distinctions between leaders and managers, as argued by leadership guru Professor John Kotter, are dissolving: managers are leaders and leaders must be able and willing to get their hands dirty and manage.

• As a result of a failure of many firms to recognize and respond to these changes, a study by Harvard Business School has concluded that the US has lost much of its capacity to compete.

• Whereas the traditional management pursued an ethos of efficiency and control, a new paradigm is being pursued by many firms that thrives on the ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment, discovery, collaboration and self-organization. (Moi ici: Mongo, Mongo, Mongo!!! Benvindos ao Estranhistão!!! Benvindos à terra da diversidade e das tribos!!! Outra falha clamorosa da tríade)

• Whereas traditional management often treated both employees and customers as inanimate “things” to be manipulated, the new management paradigm respects employees and customers as independent, thinking, feeling human beings. (Moi ici: O poder da interacção, da co-produção, do co-design. da co-criação, ...)

• The new management embraces the increased complexity inherent in the shift as an opportunity to be exploited, rather than a problem to be avoided." (Moi ici: Abraçar a mudança)

Trechos de "When Will 'The World's Dumbest Idea' Die?"
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O lucro, tal como o emprego, não é um objectivo, é uma consequência!