"The work of optimization is finding the best set of tradeoffs.
Maximization, on the other hand, seeks the solution that ranks the highest for just one goal.
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Maximizing something is simple and may be satisfying. It doesn't involve difficult tradeoffs and it's easy to measure.
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea."
Trechos retirados de "Optimized or maximized?"
"maximization as a concept just isn’t interesting to me. I don’t care about maximization. Not maximization of profit, revenue, people, reach, productivity, etc. Not interesting.Como não recordar a lição dos nabateus.
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I feel like this makes me an outcast in the business world. Part of the minority, the ones who simply “don’t get how it works”.
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I get how it works. I just don’t care. I’m not interested in squeezing something so tight that I get every last drop. I don’t want, need, or care about every last drop. Those last drops usually don’t taste as good anyway. My thirst is usually well quenched far before that final drop.
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Am I interested in increasing profits? Yes. Revenues? Yes? Being more productive? Yes. Making our products easier, faster, and more useful? Yes. Making our customers and employees happier? Yes, absolutely. Do I love iterating and improving? Yes sir.
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Do I want to make things better? All the time. But do I want to maximize “betterness”? No thanks."
"When it comes to getting people to participate in workplace weight loss programs, financial rewards may not be much of an incentive. Penalties, on the other hand, work great.A velha lição, nós humanos, somos satisficers não maximizers. Por isso, tantas vezes, só mudamos quando nos retiram da nossa zona de conforto. Por isso, só agimos a correr em resposta a um "prejuízo" em vez de actuar proactivamente.
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For three months, 281 employees at the University of Pennsylvania participated in a step challenge. The goal was to walk at least 7,000 steps a day. Researchers used different incentives: One group got $1.40 for each day they met the goal, while another got $42 up front each month, and lost $1.40 for each day they didn't finish. Also participating in the study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was a group that got to enter a lottery to win $1.40 each time the goal was reached, and a control group that got no money at all.
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Rewarding people with money, it turns out, didn't inspire more people to achieve their goal. About 30 percent of people who got no money performed their 7,000 steps, compared with about 35 percent of those with a potential reward, a statistically insignificant difference, according to lead researcher Dr. Mitesh S. Patel.
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The people who faced a penalty for failure, however, reached their goal 55 percent of the time."
"nature evolves away from constraints, not toward goals"Como eu gosto desta citação.
"there is a tenuous connection between Napoleon and Stephenson. If Bonaparte’s conquests and the corn laws had not driven up the price of corn, then horse feed would have been cheaper and the coal owners who employed Stephenson would not have risked so much money in letting him build a machine to try to find a less expensive way to pull wagons of coals from the pithead in Killingworth to the staithes on the Tyne."
"Against the idea that firms operate in competitively efficient environments there are strong intuitions that every firm has to be a “quasi-monopoly” and exploit the particularities of its products, processes, people, and engagements. No two firms can occupy exactly the same economic opportunity space.[Moi ici: O velho Gause e os seus protozoários]Trechos retirados de "Business Strategy - Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise" de J.-C. Spender.
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Strategic work is ultimately about specifics and so more about practice than the analysis of generalizations captured with language.
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Real strategic work is about finding a way through the thicket of principles and particulars, hoping for the wisdom of Solomon and resisting the cop-out of raising one principle over all other aspects—for human situations always mingle both.
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Academics tend to dismiss matrices, preferring rigorous deductions, proofs, and carefully defined generalities that suggest theories. [Moi ici: Este trecho faz-me lembrar muitas conversas no Twitter onde tenho de debater com crentes em leis económicas como se fossem leis newtonianas, gerais e automáticas, com econs em vez de humanos, com maximizers em vez de satisficers] They are less interested in synthetic statements because they apply to particulars. But strategists are always working with particulars and so have limited interest in theoretical statements."
"But what many economists generally gloss over is a notion that I will argue is highly complementary to market failures: management failures. For policy-making purposes economists assume that all businesses act rationally in the pursuit of profits. The possibility that that might not be the case is generally ignored, or even when mentioned, quickly finessed.
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Partly because profit maximization is a bedrock assumption and partly because maximization is a basic mathematical tool, economists have trouble dealing with firms that are not maximizing profits.
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Economists disagree about the actual incidence of these market failures and the cost-effectiveness of governmental efforts to tackle them, but they broadly agree that the only factors that prejudice performance are external to businesses." [Moi ici: Isso seria admitir que as empresas são todas diferentes umas das outras e, isso seria tornar impossível a tarefa de matematizar a economia]
"As empresas portuguesas devem apostar em mecanismos de antecipação da reforma dos trabalhadores mais antigos como forma de se modernizarem garantindo uma mão-de-obra mais produtiva, defendeu esta quarta-feira o governador do Banco de Portugal.Tantos equívocos de um velho lobo do mar do sector não-transaccionável e que, aposto, não faz a mínima ideia sobre como se aumenta a produtividade.
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Empresas ganhariam com trabalhadores jovens "mais baratos, flexíveis e produtivos", diz governador do Banco de Portugal."
"Empresas ganhariam com trabalhadores jovens "mais baratos,"Se eles passavam a ser mais baratos, qual o acicate para que as empresas procurassem subir na escala de valor, procurassem aumentar a produtividade, se tinham esta boleia de autêntico passageiro clandestino?
"Empresas ganhariam com trabalhadores jovens "mais ... flexíveis ...""O que se entende aqui por flexibilidade? Há falta de flexibilidade dos trabalhadores hoje em dia? Os únicos casos que conheço resultam mais de relações adversarias independentes da idade. "If you give them peanuts, you get monkeys"
"Empresas ganhariam com trabalhadores jovens "mais ... produtivos","A velha e obsoleta ideia de que mais produtividade resulta de se correr mais depressa. Mais produtividade tem de vir da gestão... ainda ontem de manhã escrevi sobre isso:
""management does indeed appear to be important in accounting for the large differences in cross-country Total Factor Productivity (TFP) as well as within-country differences."E recordo Gary Klein em:
""Conhecemos menos o país do que aquilo que pensamos. Não podemos intervir de forma consistente sobre a economia se não a conhecermos. É como a acupunctura: se não conhecermos os centros nervosos e espetamos a agulha, isso até pode prejudicar", disse Carlos Costa.Não se traduza numa humildade daquele tipo:
Acrescentou: "Especulamos muito sobre a economia, mas não a conhecemos. Estamos sempre a intervir sobre um corpo que não conhecemos""
"Em primeiro lugar, não causar dano"Ou seja, a via negativa!
"This paper shows that the share of employees in different age groups hardly has an impact on establishment productivity in the manufacturing, services and metal manufacturing sectors. On first sight, these findings contradict the notion that physically demanding, rigid and monotonous jobs might reduce the relative productivity of older employees in the (metal) manufacturing sector, or that higher flexibility and speed increase the productivity of younger employees in the services sector. However, one has to be aware that only the productivity of those employees who are actually working in the establishment is measured. We do not find strong evidence that our results reflect differences in the selectivity of older workers or in investments in old employees between sectors.Também lhe podem fazer chegar este outro e este outro... basta googlar para perceber que o senhor governador mandou uma posta de pescada.
This paper paints a positive picture of the relative productivity of older employees in different sectors of the German economy."
"I conservatively estimate that the firm sacrificed 30 percent of its potential profit through mispricing.Na vida real, e então nas PMEs isso é muito comum, a falta de indicadores e de monitorização tem consequências muito nefastas:
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Although the findings of this paper apply directly only to the firm in question, there are reasons to believe that the results obtained here may be more broadly generalizable."
"In contrast, the firm rarely changes prices – only four times in the entire 13 year period – and thus gets little feedback regarding the right price. Without feedback, the firm has no direct mechanism for learning whether it is pricing correctly. This pattern of real-time adjustments in production rates coupled with much less frequent changes in prices appears to be a common practice among firms."
"to think about procurement as a mixture of both buying and shopping. We could harp on about bizarre bazaar stories, suggesting that "buying is from Mars and shopping is from Venus," but there are far too many stereotypical pitfalls in that line of argument....
Straightforward buying is quite possibly all we need when choosing between highly commoditized products, but almost anything else we procure (most purchases and all the most important purchases) benefit from elements of shopping as well as buying.
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Returning to the notion of buying and shopping, we can now propose a better rule of thumb than "buying is from Mars, shop-ping is from Venus." Despite pitfalls of its own, "buying is for satisficers, shopping is for maximizers" is hopefully a helpful slogan."
