Mongo e os Golias

Um dos temas de eleição deste blogue é a reflexão sobre Mongo, sobre esse novo paradigma económico de mais diversidade, de mais tribos, de sucesso para as empresas pequenas. A ideia subjacente aos trechos que se seguem é uma das ideias deste blogue; o crescente sucesso das empresas pequenas leva as empresas grandes a dois tipos de reacção:

• consolidação, uma tentativa de ganhar quota de mercado à custa de fusões e aquisições;
• concentração nas actividades com mais sucesso e venda das restantes (exemplo recente e em curso da P&G)

"We’re living through an era of remarkable U.S. corporate consolidation. A recent USC study shows that across multiple and diverse markets, industries are 25% more likely to be “highly concentrated” than they were 20 years ago.
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Yet at the same time, America’s largest companies are more than twice as likely to lose market share than in 1980.
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Growing consolidation across multiple industries, but shrinking market share: What is going on? I believe that industry consolidation may be the death throes of mature industries as they struggle to compete with America’s return to a more entrepreneurial, craft economy.[Moi ici: Isto é Mongo]
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scale, “one of the last bastions from the competitive storm,” is no longer profitable or safe. [Moi ici: Isto é Mongo, o fim da escala como vantagem competitiva imediata] For a long time, technology gave big players a competitive advantage because no one else could afford to be big.
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But the radical connectivity of our digital world allows small businesses to collaborate in loose ways that give them capacities comparable to those of Walmart or Ford Motor Company.
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In my book, The End of Big, I argue that the collection of trends that comprises the end of big companies will, at its best, lead to the rise of a craft-centric economy. We’re seeing some of this already, with the rise of Etsy.com and the so-called “maker” culture.
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While this transition feels inevitable, it doesn’t mean the big companies will go without a fight. Companies such as Microsoft have enormous cash reserves that they can use to keep the ”end of big” at bay for a while. For many large companies, growing even larger provides seeming defense against the power of craft and the do-it-yourself attitude. Over time, however, smaller companies will be able to out-compete even the most powerful behemoths.
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But it’s not necessarily a winner-takes-all scenario. New strategies will emerge for bigger organizations. There is a new breed of “big” on whom the coming age of “small” is built: the platform players [Moi ici: É esperar pela próxima geração de plataformas] (like eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Apple, and Google) on whose platforms smaller businesses blossom.
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“We’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking.” Far from seeing consolidation as a sign of strength, I view the recent spate of enormous deals as indication that big firms are desperate to forestall their demise. They are being dragged kicking into the future."

Reflexões sobre o tema e suas variações no blogue ao longo dos anos:

• ""When is a company too big to manage?""
• "O grande desafio é vencer os reis Saul deste mundo"
• "Deixe de pensar como Saul, não há um caminho único"
• "Porque não somos plankton (parte II)" 
• "Porque não somos plankton..." 
• "Um filão promissor..."
• "Sobre os escombros da Torre de Babel..."
• "Mongo é inevitável mas..."
• "Sugestões para vencer Golias"

Trechos retirados de "Why More M&As Is a Sign That Scale Is No Longer an Advantage"

Blasfémia

A 13 de Dezembro de 2011 numa viagem de comboio descobri a história da Chobani.
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O fundador da Chobani relatava:

"By 2005, I thought maybe I would relax and have a family. But one day I opened a piece of mail. It said, "Fully equipped yogurt factory for sale." I threw it away. But then I thought about it later and went back and got it out of the garbage. I called. It was nearby, in South Edmeston, N.Y., near Utica. Kraft was closing it and getting out of the yogurt business. There were a million reasons not to buy it."

A realidade mostra-nos que a Chobani cresceu e tornou-se um player de relevo no mercado americano. E a Kraft? O que aconteceu à multinacional que resolveu sair do negócio dos iogurtes?

"One of the prime operating philosophies for major companies these days is to expand and do more. But when Sanjay Khosla became president of Kraft Developing Markets, he set out with the opposite in mind: To do less. By focusing on fewer products, he was betting he could build the company’s revenue and profit more effectively than through the mindless expansion he finds common to most corporations.
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His strategy was called 5-10-10. The company had dozens of product categories and more than 150 brands in over 60 countries. He mobilized efforts around five strong categories, 10 power brands, and 10 key markets. The other areas weren’t shut down, but money and other resources were to be focused on 5-10-10.
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It worked. After six years, developing markets revenue more than tripled, to $16-billion from $5-billion, with double-digit organic growth (from within existing operations, rather than through mergers or acquisitions). Profitability increased by 50 per cent. And cash flow improved."

Julgo que é isto que a Procter & Gamble também quer fazer (lembram-se do Verão passado?)
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Saliento a coragem de quem toma decisões deste tipo... gente que comete a blasfémia de não se importar com a concorrência... viver e deixar viver, cada um na sua.
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Trechos retirados de "How Kraft turned less into more"

Cuidado com o crescimento

O Estado não é ineficiente porque é Estado!
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O Estado é ineficiente porque é grande, muito grande!
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As farmacêuticas da Big Pharma padecem do mesmo mal. Gastam milhões em investigação e, apesar disso, estão a transformar-se em empresas de genéricos, apostadas na produção de mega-quantidades a custos super-competitivos.
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A Procter & Gamble descobriu há anos que grandes centros de investigação são...
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Ineficientes!
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E começou a recorrer ao exterior para alimentar o seu pipeline de novos produtos:
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"Open innovation powers growth"
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Será que as nossas PMEs não têm nada a aprender com esta abordagem?

O papel da gestão de topo (parte II)

Continuado daqui.
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"The second CEO task is to identify the competitive spaces where you can win. Drucker said, “Equally important - and also a task only the CEO can fulfill - is to decide, What is our business? What should it be? What is not our business? And what should it not be?”
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The second most important decision we made in 2000 - after “The consumer is boss” - was where P&G would play and where it would not play. We began by analyzing several factors: The most important were the structural attractiveness of the businesses we were in or considering; P&G’s leadership position relative to its competitors; and the strategic fit of various industries with P&G’s core competencies and strengths - consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market capability, and global scale.
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Answering the question of where not to play (Moi ici: Decisão fundamental e tantas vezes esquecida) involved just as thorough an evaluation, using the same criteria of structural attractiveness, core strengths, competitive position, demographic trends, and the potential to
globalize and grow.
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Determining which businesses we should not be in is an ongoing effort that calls for continual pruning and weeding. Disposing of assets is not as sexy as acquiring them, but it’s just as important. Drucker said, “On these two decisions—‘What is our outside?’ and ‘What is our business?’—[rest] all the other work and all the other decisions inherent to being a CEO"
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Trechos retirados de "What Only the CEO Can Do" publicado pela HBR em Maio de 2009.