Uma teoria para o negócio

A propósito deste postal, recordo este excerto: "a empresa que encerrou era bem gerida, inovadora tecnologicamente, terá contudo tomado decisões estratégicas que acabaram por ditar o seu futuro".

Numa pequena conversa acerca do postal, acabamos por nos recordar de um artigo de Peter Drucker, na revista Harvard Business Review em Setembro-Outubro de 1994: "The theory of the business".

"Yet "what to do" is increasingly becoming the central challenge facing managements"

"The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done - but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization's behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what the organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are about markets. They are about identifying customers and competitors, their values and behavior. They are about technology and its dynamics, about a company's strengths and weanesses. These assumptions are about what a company gets paid for. They are what I call a company's theory of the business."

"Some theories of the business are so powerful that they last for a long time. But being human artifacts, they don't last forever, and, indeed, today they rarely last for very long at all. Eventually every theory of the business becomes obsolete and then invalid."

Uma das receitas que Drucker propõe, para evitar ser esmagado pela força da realidade, passa pela prevenção e flexibilidade: "Every three years, an organization should challenge every product, every service, every policy, every distribution channel with the question: If we were not in it already, would we be going into it now? By questioning accepted policies and routines, the organization forces itself to think about its theory. It forces itself to test assumptions. It forces itself to ask: Why didn´t this work, even though it looked so promising when we went in to it five years ago? Is it because we made a mistake? Is it because we did the wrong things? Or is it because the right things didn't work?
Without systematic and purposeful abandonement, an organization will be overtaken by events. It will squander its best resources on things it should necer have been doing or should no longer do. As a result, it will lack the resources, especially capable people, needed to exploit the opportunities that arise when markets, thechnologies, and core competencies change. In other words, it will be unable to respond constructively to the opportunities that are created when its theory of the business becomes obsolete."