A lente macro é tão ...

"When the world's business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, "is in a very sweet spot." Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.

...

A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance. But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong. [Moi ici: Mas quem é que achava que estava tudo bem?]

The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago - the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency look to be running off the rails. [Moi ici: Este blogue sempre achou errada a crença absoluta na maximização da eficiência, basta recordar os marcadores eficiência, eficientismo e denominador]

...

Globalization, seen in recent decades as unstoppable a force as gravity, is clearly evolving in unpredictable ways.  [Moi ici: Outra tema caro a este blogue, há mais de 17 anos que escrevemos aqui sobre as forças a minar a globalização. Recordo O regresso dos clientes, Especulação - um epílogo?] The move away from an integrated world economy is accelerating. And the best way to respond is a subject of fierce debate.

...

As the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization "were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic - and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine."[Moi ici: Nunca esqueço de Maio de 2020 - El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha]

...

Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity. [Moi ici: Recordo aquilo a que chamo a doença anglo-saxónica, recordo as críticas que fazemos há anos à automatização - Especulação sobre mais um falhanço da automatização, recordo o que escrevo sobre Kevin O'Leary]

...

The story of the international economy today, said Henry Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is about "how geopolitics is gobbling up hyperglobalization. [Moi ici: O que me impressiona nestas análises é que me parecem demasiado macro. Há mais de uma década que a globalização está a recuar por causa de Mongo, por causa do fim do modelo do século XX, por causa de "We are all weird"]

...

"Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous," Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to "oversimplified market efficiency," he added, proved to be a mistake." [Moi ici: O que me impressiona nestas análises é a crença de que a economia é como a física newtoniana, quando a economia é a continuação da biologia"]

Trechos retirados do artigo, "Failures of Globalization Shatter Long-Held Beliefs", publicado no NYT do passado Domingo. 

"investments to increase income"

“What people informally call making money refers to profit margins: income minus cost. Making money is thus a function of increasing income and/or reducing cost. Unfortunately, most efforts toward making money focus exclusively on increasing operational efficiency by cutting cost, thereby ignoring any opportunities to reallocate money for processes that use the money more effectively to generate additional income or to reduce cost. As a result, decision makers show surprisingly little interest in investments to increase income (grow bottom-line results), other than through merger and acquisition transactions.”

Trecho retirado de "The Root Cause: Rethink Your Approach to Solving Stubborn Enterprise-Wide Problems" de Hans Norden.

"esta obsessão dos cêntimos"

No livro, "Strategy Pathfinder" encontrei esta imagem:

Ainda acrescentaria algumas entidades a este ecossistema. Por exemplo, os influenciadores, ou os prescritores.

Voltei a recordar-me desta imagem ao ler, "Fábricas cortam intermediários para chegar ao consumidor", um tema já tratado recentemente em "É preciso trabalhar na originação de valor.". Uma evolução positiva, mas que me deixa com algumas reticências. Sorrio porque esta gente está a seguir um conselho antigo deste blogue, "Outra forma de David bater Golias". 

No entanto, o tema que queria sublinhar neste postal é outro:

"“Como conseguimos mais do que vender produtos, vender conceitos, estatuto. Qualquer coisa mais que nos preencha, além do produto. E não tenhamos medo de falar do preço. Em Portugal há sempre um bicho papão quando chegamos a esse momento. Se andamos com esta obsessão dos cêntimos, não vamos sair do mesmo lugar. Portugal vive aprisionado no preço”, desabafa."

Sim, a concentração no denominador, na eficiência, no custo, em vez da concentração no numerador, no valor:

Enquanto esta revolução mental não for feita por uma massa crítica ...

BTW, não esquecer o conselho dos velhos estóicos, nunca apostar mais do que se pode perder sem arruinar o empreendimento, "Tail risks can screw you up".

"We become what we do"

Comecei a ouvir o último livro de Seth Godin durante as viagens de carro para fora de Gaia. Seth Godin é um autor que escreve para os humanos de Mongo, os humanos que fogem do século XX e abraçam a arte em todas as suas facetas.

BTW, recordar o que escrevemos aqui ao longo dos anos sobre a arte e o eficientismo. Por isso, apelar à arte fere o mindset assente no século XX.

"For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we’d like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn’t well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it’s going to work.

It’s about throwing, not catching. Starting, not finishing. Improving, not being perfect.

No one learns to ride a bike from a manual.

...

Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.

No change, no art.

...

It’s a form of leadership, not management. A process without regard for today’s outcome, a commitment to the journey.

You were born ready to make art. But you’ve been brainwashed into believing that you can’t trust yourself enough to do so.

You’ve been told you don’t have enough talent (but that’s okay, because you can learn the skill instead).

You’ve been told you’re not entitled to speak up (but now you can see how many others have taken their turns).

And you’ve been told that if you can’t win, you shouldn’t even try (but now you see that the journey is the entire point).

Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.

...

“If we believe that it’s not our turn, that we’re not talented enough, we’ll do whatever we can to make that story true. We’ll sit back and wait to be chosen instead. [Moi ici: Algo que li recentemente como sendo o efeito Forer]

That’s backward.

Most of the time, the story we live by came from somewhere. It might be the way we were raised, or it could be the outcome of a series of events. Burn yourself on the stove and you might persuade yourself that you should go nowhere near a stove. Grow up in a home with low expectations and it’s possible you’ll begin to believe them. The story we tell ourselves leads to the actions we take.

If you want to change your story, change your actions first. When we choose to act a certain way, our mind can’t help but rework our narrative to make those actions become coherent.

We become what we do.”

Trechos retirados de "The Practice" de Seth Godin.

“Or consider the Forer effect. This is the strong tendency that subjects show to believe feedback from personality tests, regardless of whether those results are bogus.”

Trecho retirado de "Uncharted" de Margaret Heffernan. 

Acreditam mesmo?

O artigo que me alertou para a saída do novo livro de Roger Martin, "Overcoming America’s Obsession With Economic Efficiency":

"It explains why the pursuit of efficiency stems from the notion of firms as complicated machines and attempting to maximize their efficiency, rather than as complex adaptive systems, within markets which themselves are also complex adaptive systems."

Um tema clássico deste blogue e da minha guerra profissional.

No início do livro pode ler-se:

"Professor Wassily Leontief and I almost overlapped at Harvard University. Leontief, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics,
...
To Leontief, the US economy was a very big, complicated machine, fundamentally not unlike a car. A car has many subsystems—power train, steering, cooling/heating/ventilation, entertainment, safety, and so forth—each of which can be understood independently and then pieced together to produce the desired vehicle with the desired characteristics. Across the operation of that vehicle, the input-output equations are clear. When you push the gas pedal, the car speeds up. When you slam on the brakes, the car comes to a halt. As with a car, the inputs and outputs of the various subsystems of the economy could be mapped out and understood. Because he saw the economy as an understandable and analyzable machine, Leontief was a fan of planning, and during the economically challenged 1970s he argued that national planning might be the only hope for US economic policy.[Moi ici: Enquanto lia estas linhas ao longo da marginal marítima de Gaia, no silêncio das 6h30 da manhã, visualizei um ex-governador do Banco de Portugal, Vítor Constâncio, a falar sobre as vantagens e virtudes do "socialismo científico". Recordei as minhas guerras contra os que vêem a economia como se fosse física newtoniana"]
...
While I was taking my undergraduate economics courses, I was naive as to the power of models to shape actions and the power of metaphors to drive the adoption of models. I believed that the models I was being taught were descriptions of how the economy actually works. It took me a while to figure out that those models are no more than a theory of how the economy might work, if the economy were, in fact, like a car. And it is because we are all so convinced that the US economy is like a car that we stick with models like Leontief’s even when those models no longer generate accurate predictions concerning the economic outcomes that will follow our interventions.

Though not cognizant of it at the time, I was exclusively taught “neoclassical Keynesian economics."

Como é que dizia Napoleão? Agora pensemos nos governos que se sucedem e nas fórmulas que os orientam. Pensem nos milhares de milhões que vão ser despejados na economia para, supostamente criar uma nova economia... sei que muitos pensam em aceder à gamela, mas os outros? Acreditam mesmo que uma economia se rege top-down de forma virtuosa?

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better”

A lição da clorofila

Estudar a biologia para perceber a economia é uma das lições que há muito aprendi.

"Their findings point to an evolutionary principle governing light-harvesting organisms that might apply throughout the universe. They also offer a lesson that — at least sometimes — evolution cares less about making biological systems efficient than about keeping them stable."

Como não recordar a lição dos nabateus:

"A máxima eficiência leva à rotura frequente das tubagens." 

Como não relacionar com as cadeias de fornecimento super-eficientes, mas longas e inflexíveis.

Trecho retirado de "Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis."

"we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness"

"Most efforts at becoming customer-centric are well intentioned. Most people charged with implementing such initiatives are doing the best they can. The underlying reasons that most companies aren’t close to being customer-centric are varied. 

...
Yet all too often the reason comes down to this: we are only pretending to care. Because if we really cared, we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness.
...
Many problems rest in basic survey design and structure. We may be measuring our performance against what we have predetermined are important purchasing variables that may have once been valid but no longer are. We may be talking only to current customers, when more relevant insights could come from listening to lapsed customers and/or prospects.
...
once we understand that people buy the story before they buy the product, we have to expand our view of what goes into a purchase decision. It’s rarely all about the product or customers simply trading off price against functional features and benefits.
...
The second challenge of historical approaches is limiting our view of the people (individually and collectively) who need to be considered and enrolled in our efforts to drive remarkable results. Clearly a laser focus on our target consumers is critically important. Yet the journey to remarkable requires a broader system of people (those who work for us, with us, are connected to us), processes, practices, technology, and so on that must be engaged to drive the outcomes we desire."

Aquele "we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness" fez-me logo recordar disto:

Trechos retirados do capítulo 13 "Essential #2: Human-Centered" de Remarkable Retail.

"acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha"

Não me canso de pensar e de chocar com esta frase:

"El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha..."

Volto a ela na sequência de "Companies must strengthen their buffers against shocks":

"The Covid-19 outbreak has exposed the thin margins on which much of global business runs. Highly indebted companies, working from lean inventory, supported by just-in-time supply chains and staffed by short-term contractors, have borne the brunt of the sudden blow. They will now suffer the rolling, longer-term impact of its unpredictable consequences. Too late, many executives and owners have realised that by pursuing the holy grail of ever greater efficiency, they sacrificed robustness, resilience and effectiveness. In many cases, they will turn out to have sacrificed the business itself."

O que tem sido este blogue senão um constante alerta para a sabedoria nabateia e para a doença anglo-saxónica, para a paranóia da eficiência e do denominador em vez da eficácia. Tudo aqui neste postal recente, por exemplo.

Eficiência versus adaptabilidade

O meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras mandou-me este artigo, "6 Critical Lessons in Organisational Agility from the COVID-19 crisis". A introdução está em sintonia com as mensagens do blogue:

"Most businesses are designed for efficiency, not adaptability. [Moi ici: Recordar os marcadores do eficientismo, da eficiência, do numerador versus denominador] The underlying philosophy is to obtain the maximum yield for an acceptable effort and to scale this as effectively as possible. Last century’s Scientific Management is the key influence.  [Moi ici: Recordar o marcador sobre magnitograd, recordar Levitown, recordar o século XX]  Such businesses, by design, are not built to suddenly change course. They are designed to do key activities efficiently."

Há tempos aqui no blogue citei:

"for at least the next couple months every organisation in the world is a startup" 

E:

"El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha..." 

Nos próximos tempos ainda faz mais sentido pensar em adaptabilidade:

"In contrast, a start-up is designed to be incredibly adaptable. It’s structure is fluid as it continually pivots to find the right product-market fit in order to survive. It is fast and nimble and can easy out-manoeuvre larger organisations, but it isn’t efficient and it can’t scale.

...
In a traditional firm (the freighter), intelligence and decision making is centralised. Decisions are made at the “top” of the firm and supporting directives cascade to the people doing the tasks. When decisions need to be made, they must flow back up to the centralised control and then back down again. The delay directly prevents agility.
.
In an adaptive firm, authority is pushed to the people with the information. In other words, the people at the coalface are empowered to make appropriate decisions as required. If the decision requires others, they find the people required and attempt to make the decision as quickly as possible." 

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia

Quem conhece este blogue já sabe que há muitos anos escrevo sobre o eficientismo, escrevo sobre o denominador, escrevo sobre aquilo a que chamo a doença ango-saxónica.

Sobre a doença anglo-saxónica recordo, por exemplo:

• "Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica" (Agosto de 2019)
• "A doença anglo-saxónica" (Julho de 2019)
• "o choque com a teimosia anglo-saxónica de continuar a acreditar no século XX: eficiência, volume, escala, custo." (Junho de 2017)
• "Esta ideia da concorrência perfeita tornou-se no modelo mental da gestão anglo-saxónica que permeia e molda o pensamento dos autores da narrativa oficial, aqui e no resto do mundo." (Fevereiro de 2014)

O paradigma desta doença é Kevin O'Leary.

Sobre o eficientismo recordo, por exemplo:

• Fragilidade, flexibilidade, futuro e eficiência (Novembro de 2019)
• Contra o Evangelho do Eficientismo (Março de 2016)

Não posso listar um décimo dos postais que escrevi sobre estes temas, apenas recordo mais um. O título que se segue lista o vocabulário clássico usado neste blogue acerca do tema: "profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta" (Fevereiro de 2019)

O contrário da doença anglo-saxónica é seguir a via de Mongo. Em "Acerca do eficientismo", um postal de Dezembro de 2018, relaciono tudo isto, voltando a um postal de Dezembro de 2011, "Estranhistão ... weirdistão" e a outro de Agosto de 2011 sobre a sabedoria nabateia.

Por que recordo tudo isto?

Ontem à noite, já deitado, dei uma última vista de olhos pela minha timeline do Twitter e encontrei:

My new @washingtonpost editorial. The virus shows that making our companies efficient also made our country weak https://t.co/OKvzqd96sR More to come in my Sep 2020 book: When More is not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

— Roger L. Martin (@RogerLMartin) March 27, 2020

Alguns sublinhados do artigo:

"Efficiency is an unforgiving master. It crushes everything not in service of an immediate bottom line. But if there is a single economic policy lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that the United States’ obsession with efficiency over the past half-century has brutally undermined its capacity to deal with such a catastrophic event.
.
Efficiency requires us to force out duplication and redundancy, increase specialization and more seamlessly connect things together. Resilience, on the other hand, enables us to adapt to changes in our environment. Efficiency and resilience are opposing forces in our economy, and the pandemic has shown us the high price we are paying for the modern focus on efficiency at the expense of resilience"

Como não recuar ao meu mágico Verão de 2008, mágico porque aprendi tanta coisa que influenciou o meu trabalho até hoje:

Quanto mais pura é uma estratégia, maior rentabilidade se pode obter, mas também maior o risco, e menor a flexibilidade, e maior a taxa de mortalidade se o mundo mudar rapidamente. Daí a importância de uma floresta de estratégias diversificadas a que chamo Mongo, um mundo de inúmeros picos na paisagem competitiva enrugada:

Daí o meu fascínio por um artigo de 2007 que citei pela primerira vez aqui em "O Grande Planeador, o Grande Geómetra, já era!":

"Life is the most resilient thing on the planet. It 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?
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."

Cuidado com os arautos de um novo socialismo, cuidado com os defensores de um governo mundial: o CyberSyn só nos trará a venezuelização como destino final.

Voltando ao artigo de Roger Martin:

"Third, by spreading so quickly, this pandemic has already illustrated the downside of our seamlessness in travel and trade. Early on in this pandemic, complete travel bans were seen as overly disruptive and draconian. For the future, we need to accept that the timely imposition of travel restrictions, within and across countries, is a powerful and necessary weapon, and adjust our travel expectations accordingly.
.
All these measures would introduce productive friction into a system that has been developed over 50 years to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. As this pandemic has shown us, we need to value other qualities such as redundancy and buffers, if we are to tackle the next catastrophic event."

Daqui ressalta a importância da proximidade, outro tema desenvolvido ao longo dos anos aqui no blogue. Daqui ressalta a importância que a União Europeia como espaço económico comum representa para este pais socialista, pobre (sim, eu sei é uma redundância), envelhecido e dominado por instituições extractivas.

Basta olhar para esta tabela, retirada do dossiê sobre Portugal no World Footwear Yearbook Snapshot 2017

Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos exportado de Portugal? 26,09 USD
Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos importado para Portugal? 11,69 USD

Mais uma vez, cuidado com os "bicicletas" deste mundo, autênticos Sarumans nas suas torres de marfim, sem noção do que é a realidade da vida micro-económica, mas sempre dispostos a agir como governantes iluminados que sabem melhor do que nós próprios o que é melhor para nós. Convido à leitura desta série de quatro postais de Outubro de 2015 que ilustram factualmente a ignorância dessa gente.

Como diz o grande Nassim Taleb: Intelectuals Yet Idiots.

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia se não lhes derem o dinheiro para continuar o deboche que nos tem trazido até aqui, um país político que gasta tanto tempo e energia a discutir como distribuir a riqueza e não se preocupa em como facilitar a sua criação .

"How to Break Out of the Efficiency Trap"

"The nature of work is evolving in two complementary directions. In one direction, managers are redesigning jobs to take advantage of new opportunities to automate workflow processes. Their aim: transform how workers execute tasks in order to boost efficiencies and reduce costs. At the same time, some managers are redefining work to take advantage of new capacity freed up by job redesign. With work redefinition, work is no longer simply about task execution; it’s about creating new sources of value for customers and the business.
...
The less familiar but more expansive approach is to redefine what work is all about: It shifts the primary objective of work from efficiency to broader value creation. When work is appropriately redefined, workers focus on identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities instead of executing tasks.
...
Without an overriding strategy of redefining work, workers represent cost savings rather than freed capacity to create new value for the business or the customer.
.
Companies won’t be able to significantly improve value creation if they redesign jobs to optimize processes with the goal of reducing costs.[Moi ici: Recordar a 3M e o 6-sigma]
...
The workforce challenge for most companies is to make the transition from fixed work outcomes that deliver limited value to dynamic work outcomes with higher levels of potential value. A major part of this shift is to recognize that virtually all workers at every level of the organization, aided by machines, have the ability to anticipate what customers really want or need and to develop new approaches to meet those needs.
...
How to Break Out of the Efficiency Trap.
Many companies engaged in redesigning jobs today are caught in a kind of efficiency trap that prevents managers from realizing, or even pursuing, the potential of redefining work. To understand the scale and scope of this issue, executives need to embrace the fact that they are in the midst of a shift from scalable efficiency, where value creation in steady-state business environments focuses on optimization and predictability, to a future state of scalable learning, where conditions and requirements change rapidly and value creation focuses on learning and adaptation.
...
Many companies continue to see their workforce as resources to be managed, controlled, and mechanized. (We have spent the past 100-plus years exploiting models of Frederick Taylor’s ideas of scientific management.)
.
To overcome the obstacles — of short-term cost optimization, Taylorism, and a single-minded focus on automation — leaders must first develop a compelling longer-term vision of the opportunity.
...
1.Zoom out to develop a sense of what the unmet needs of the marketplace might be, what types of impact might be most valuable, and what the most meaningful metrics will be.
...
2.Redesign jobs to free up capacity for redefined work. Use automation or other technologies and workforce alternatives to perform rote work that prevents the workforce from spending more time on better understanding and addressing customer needs."

Trechos retirados de "Redefining Work for New Value: The Next Opportunity"

Trabalhar uma marca a sério.

Artesãos versus industrialistas.
Artesãos versus carcaças ocas.
Artesãos versus aristocratas arruinados.

"The danger — expressed most simply — is living by the quarter. If there’s one thing that leaps out from the work done by eatbigfish around challenger brands, it’s that these businesses knew building a brand takes time.
...
Unfortunately, short-termism is the business climate of our time. We live in the short-term. The danger is that because so few in the c-suites of major businesses these days have marketing experience they don’t understand that imposing short-term disciplines on marketing kills brands.
...
if you pursue efficiency solely you walk away from effectiveness, and we know this very well now. The most efficient way to use marketing and advertising is to achieve mediocre results at minute cost. That way you get immense returns on investments, but unfortunately you’ll do nothing in the long-term.
.
Long-term growth is reaching, not for low-hanging fruit, but the fruit at the top of the tree. It’s about bringing tomorrow’s consumers into your brand. If all you’re doing is going for the low-hanging fruit at the bottom of the funnel, you can kiss goodbye to that really profitable long-term growth."

Trechos retirados de "‘Challenger thinking is how brands drive growth’: Peter Field on 20 years of challenger brands"

Relações, sofisticação e co-criação

Encontrei uma pequena pérola, mais uma, ao ler  "Prime movers" de Rafel Martinez e Johan Wallin.

"Customer contacts are thus the R&D of the co-productive economy. Finding out which are one's most sophisticated customers - the ones one can learn most with - is thus a crucial piece of information."

Essencial para subir na escala de valor, essencial para crescer nos eixos dos conteúdos de serviço e humano.

Quem são os clientes mais sofisticados que a sua empresa tem? Esse grupo é o que se sente underserved:

Como não recordar e confrontar com:

 Que rebati com:

Quem não aposta no "cheaper" e no "cost", aposta na interacção, aposta na co-criação, aposta noutro mindset... eu diria, "Every visit customers have to make are an opportunity for interaction and co-creation"

Ou usando a terminologia da fricção:

"It is a mistake to try to reduce friction when it is positive, just as it is a mistake not to remove it when it is negative." 

Cuidado com a eficiência.

Fragilidade, flexibilidade, futuro e eficiência

Há anos que escrevo aqui no blogue sobre:

• O Evangelho do Valor;
• O eficientismo e o denominador;
• A eficácia e o numerador.

É uma linguagem que não costumo encontrar. O mainstream continua mergulhado no paradigma do século XX.

Pois bem, mão amiga mandou-me um recorte do livro "Sur/petition: The New Business Formula to Help You Stay Ahead of the Competition" de Edward de Bono:

"Efficiency is the ratio between input and output. It asks, what is the best output that I can get for the resources that I put in? For this required output, what is the minimum of resources that I must put in? If we think in terms of efficiency, we have to think in terms of input/output ratios.
Efficiency means productivity. Efficiency means no waste. Efficiency means getting the best out of our efforts, energy and resources. What can possibly be wrong about that?
To begin with, efficiency looks at input and output and does not look at the customer.
...
There are further problems with the concept of efficiency. Efficiency is measurable at one point in time. While efficiency has to be measurable, what may happen in the future cannot be measured. So it is left out of any efficiency equation. You design a suspension system for the bumps it encounters right now, not for all the possible bumps it might encounter in the future. Efficiency has always got to look backward and historically. It seeks to maximize what is now being done and what is now known.
When the future turns out not to be exactly as predicted, which is usually the case, efficiency may actually have gotten us into trouble. Very efficient businesses are often very brittle. There is no cushion and no give, because there has been no waste and no slack. Bamboo scaffolding around major buildings in Hong Kong seems flimsy and insubstantial. In fact, it is very strong because it is flexible, and stresses and strains are shared all around.
Efficiency is often the enemy of flexibility, and in today’s business world, flexibility is becoming more and more important."

Não é comum encontrar quem me acompanhe na crítica à paranóia do eficientismo.

E aquele "Very efficient businesses are often very brittle" é uma das lições que se pode tirar do postal dos almoços grátis de 2008:

Quanto mais pura é uma estratégia maior a rentabilidade, mas também maior o risco se o mundo muda.

Excerto de: Edward De Bono. “Sur/petition”. Apple Books. 

Inovação e curiosidade

Muitas vezes vejo artigos sobre inovação a confundir variabilidade com variedade.

Inovação tem tudo a ver com variedade, e variedade com curiosidade e criatividade.

"Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought.
...
Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies.
...
Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. [Moi ici: Aumentar a eficiência passa por reduzir a variabilidade. É a cozinha do McDonald's, experiências não são permitidas - execução, execução, execução]
...
My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
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Twice a week for four weeks, half of them received a text message at the start of their workday that read, “What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”"

Trechos retirados de "Why Curiosity Matters"

Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica

Há anos que escrevo aqui no blogue sobre Mongo.
Já usei esse marcador 1347 vezes, a primeira em Agosto de 2010.
A primeira vez que usei essa metáfora aqui no blogue foi em Novembro de 2007 com "A cauda longa e o planeta Mongo".

No mundo em que trabalho vejo cada vez mais exemplos de empresas que seguem o caminho de Mongo porque é uma boa alternativa para fugir do embate directo com os gigantes que competem pela eficiência. Como escrevo aqui há milhares de anos, competir pelo preço não é para quem quer, é para quem pode. E quase nenhuma PME pode. [Recordar Agosto de 2006]

Seguir o caminho de Mongo é também uma boa opção para subir na escala de valor, aproveitar o poder do numerador, praticar o Evangelho do Valor e aumentar a produtividade muito mais do que só com base no denominador.

O meu mundo profissional não costuma ser o mundo das empresas grandes, das empresas cotadas na bolsa e das empresas com accionistas de curto-prazo. Esse outro mundo onde raramente entro é um mundo que vejo como dominado por uma doença, a doença anglo-saxónica (Fevereiro de 2014 e Julho de 2019). Só conhecem a eficiência para aumentar a produtividade, não sabem que a criatividade é muito mais eficaz a consegui-lo. Pensam que a paisagem competitiva continua a ser a da figura da esquerda quando estamos cada vez mais na da direita:

Conhecem Kevin O'Leary? Ele é o paradigma da doença amplo-saxónica, produto do século XX. (Atenção ao post scrcriptum no final deste postal)

Este mês de Agosto tem sido fértil em leituras sobre esta temática, mas sobre o ponto de vista de quem trabalha sobretudo com empresas grandes. Por exemplo, esta manhã li "Reflections of a business guru":

"The experience led him to reflect on the “curse of efficiency”. Organisations focus so much on efficiency that they fail to be effective. [Moi ici: Isto até arrepia de tão em linha com a comparação que costumamos fazer aqui entre eficácia e eficiência Eficácia, eficiência, e produtividade e Apostar no numerador, no valor e não no lápis vermelho (parte II)] Instead of concentrating on their core goal, they pay attention to narrower measures like cutting costs, or reducing the inconvenience suffered by their staff. Examples of the problem can be found in many places."

Mas a lista é longa, por exemplo:

• Reli "Rethinking Efficiency" que já comentei aqui "Acerca do eficientismo" (Dezembro de 2018)
• How Serious Are You About "Shareholder Value Is Not Everything"?
• Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say
• Reli "Managing for the Long Term"
• General Electric: US giant hits back over $38bn fraud claim

Já por várias vezes tive discordâncias no Twitter com gente da minha área política porque para eles o grande objectivo é que as empresas tenham lucro. Para mim, ter lucro é uma consequência não o objectivo. Para mim, ter lucro é uma condição de sobrevivência não a razão de ser de um negócio. Aquilo a que John Kay chama de obliquity.

exploitation através de local searches quando a paisagem competitiva está em mudança

Em Fevereiro último escrevi ""profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta"".

O que fez a Kraft Heinz no início do ano? Escolheu um novo CEO com um passado na indústria cervejeira moldado no sucesso através do volume e eficiência. Agora apanho "Kraft Heinz shares slump on new writedowns and falling sales":

"Kraft Heinz, the Warren Buffett-backed food company, has disclosed another $1.2 billion (€1.07 billion) of write-downs, on top of the $15 billion charge it took earlier this year to reflect how shoppers have been shunning its brands.
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Its shares fell 13 per cent on Thursday morning, taking the decline for the year to 38 per cent." 

Empresa a precisar de um corte epistemológico, a precisar de ir em busca de uma nova estratégia corporativa, opta por continuar a sua busca por óptimos locais na paisagem competitiva enrugada, quando os picos do passado estão a afundar-se por alteração da percepção dos clientes.

Recordar:

• "Warns of Margin Threat as Niche Brands Disrupt Industry" (Março de 2019)  
• O século XX continua por cá (parte III) (Julho de 2017) 
• Porque não somos plankton... (Agosto de 2014)

Relacionar com este texto de Seth Godin "The old media/new media chasm":

"New media tends to be adopted by amateurs first. And it rarely has a mass audience in the early days (because it’s new). But professional content for the masses is precisely what old media stands for. As new media gains traction, the old media doubles down on what they believe to be their value, because they no longer have a monopoly on attention.
...
So the Times publishes a snarky, poorly written takedown of podcasts. Not because it’s based on the economic or cultural reality of today, but because their self-esteem requires there to be a chasm between all of these amateur podcasts and the few professional ones that they deign to create and publish.
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Businesses make their own choices and suffer the consequences."

E volto a há dias atrás:

"Três grupos:

• os que agem ao primeiro sinal e partem em exploration de novas alternativas;

• os que por cegueira ou incapacidade continuam a sua vida de exploitation através de local searches; e

• os que assumem a exploitation até ao fim, conscientes de que mesmo assim, terão de fazer a sua mudança, porque os dois primeiros grupos vão libertar quota de mercado, voluntária ou involuntariamente."

Mongo e magia (parte IX)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII e parte VIII.

“no one believes in magic any more. Yet magic does still exist – it is found in the fields of psychology, biology and the science of perception, rather than in physics and chemistry. And it can be created.
...
We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
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but had got it into their heads that the value of something lies solely in what it is. This was a false assumption, because you don’t need to tinker with atomic structure to make lead as valuable as gold – all you need to do is to tinker with human psychology so that it feels as valuable as gold. At which point, who cares that it isn’t actually gold?
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If you think that’s impossible, look at the paper money in your wallet or purse; the value is exclusively psychological. Value resides not in the thing itself, but in the minds of those who value it. You can therefore create (or destroy) value it in two ways – either by changing the thing or by changing minds about what it is.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Mongo e magia (parte VIII)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI e parte VII.

Um texto que parece tirado deste blogue:

“Business, technology and, to a great extent, government have spent the last several decades engaged in an unrelenting quest for measurable gains in efficiency. [Moi ici: No caso dos governos basta recordar a paranóia das escolas-cidade e hospitais-cidade, basta recordar o meu ataque ao eficientismo e ao denominador, o desconhecimento do Evangelho do Valor] However, what they have never asked, is whether people like efficiency as much as economic theory believes they do. The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.
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The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.
When every function of a business is looked at from the same narrow economic standpoint, the same game is applied endlessly. Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it – or remove it entirely – then regard the savings as profit.
...
[Moi ici: Recordar quando falo dos Muggles e daqueles que não nutrem relações de amor com clientes, produtos e serviços] Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the invention of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analysts, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyse, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet. There is no need to prove that your cost-saving works empirically, as long as it is consistent with standard economic theory. It is a simple principle of business that, however badly your decision turns out, you will never be fired for following economics, even though its predictive value lies somewhere between water divining and palmistry.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

"move beyond a focus on efficiency"

"For many companies, the traditional path to value creation is simply too narrow, centered on driving efficiencies rather than growth and innovation. Creating new value often requires employers to think differently about work in three ways:
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The objective of work becomes expanding value, not delivering scalable efficiency.
The work itself entails addressing unseen problems and opportunities, not executing routine tasks.
The work draws on human capabilities such as imagination, intuition, curiosity, creativity, and empathy—not on skills tied to a particular task or technology.[Moi ici: Recordem os profetas do Armagedão provocado pela automatização]
With this broader view, companies can move beyond a focus on efficiency—and beyond growth driven by M&A and market share—and aim to create new forms of customer value. Organizations can do this by looking for ways to create additional meaning for the customer. This typically starts by deeply understanding customers’ needs and aspirations, now and in the future—and deep understanding requires more than just soliciting customer feedback or monitoring net promoter scores. Because these needs and aspirations are limitless and rapidly evolving, there is always more value that companies can create for customers."

Parece um texto retirado deste blogue ...

A aposta no numerador versus o eficientismo da aposta no denominador.

A aposta na originação do valor.

A treta da tríade, apesar de tudo, vai precisar ainda de alguns anos, talvez 10 a 20 para ser varrida para o caixote do lixo da história. Economia não é física newtoniana ou galilaica, em economia o que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira.

Trechos retirados de "Redefine Work to Bring New Value to Customers"