Ser diferente

Ontem, ao final de um dia de auditoria, enquanto aguardava "boleia" para atravessar a área produtiva, junto à máquina de café encontrei o número de 31 de Março de 2008 da revista Fortune com este interessante artigo "Target's inner circle" de onde saliento este trecho:

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"“when Wal-Mart first made inroads into Target country. With its everyday-low-price strategy, Wal-Mart began eating into Target's sales while spending far less on marketing than Target, which produced colorful - and costly - Sunday advertising sections. Alarmed, Ulrich approved a test in 1985, converting 50 Target stores in Albuquerque and Knoxville, Tenn., to emphasize low prices. Quickly, Target found that it did okay in new stores but abysmally in places where people were trained to expect that circular. "We realized that we wouldn't ever be able to convert the entire chain," says Jones. "And we couldn't really run a bifurcated strategy." (Moi ici: Ninguém pode!)

Target faced a choice - one that easily might have put it in the same spot as doomed chains like Caldor or Bradlees. "Some people tried to do the dance on both sides," says Ulrich. "As Wal-Mart got bigger and bigger, [other rivals] started emulating them more, but they were still trying to appeal to an upscale guest. They'd pile shit in the middle of their aisle and then throw in some merchandise that wasn't the right quality for the store level. It's the classic mistake." (Moi ici: Don't try to compete with China on cost and wal-Mart on price)

Instead, Ulrich's team saw an opening: If Wal-Mart was striving to be the king of logistics, with enough muscle to force vendors to deliver on price, Target could deliver on a great store experience and a product that was exciting and unique. "Wal-Mart's strategy is in many ways more simple than ours," says Ulrich. "It's more about price and more about mass quantities. It's a hell of a competition, but ours is more dependent on innovation, on design, and on quality." (Moi ici: Não combater no campo que dá vantagem ao adversário! Sun-Tzu no seu melhor.)

What Target did have, thanks to its department store sisters, was access to people who anticipated desires. So Ulrich started a trend department, bringing over fashion scouts from Dayton Hudson, who started by expanding the color palette for T-shirts. "I can remember all the skepticism," says Jones.”"

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Arnoldo Hax ajuda à festa com este raciocínio retirado de "The Delta Model - Reinventing Your Business Strategy":

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"Until now, the prevailing view – shared by most practicing managers and academics – has been to define the goal of strategy as achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Most, if not all, of the most respected and popular frameworks that guide the strategy development process are anchored in this concept. This is a mindset likely to cause severe problems moving forward.

First, it puts our competitors at the center of our management process. Competitors become our driving force, our relevant benchmark. We look at strategy, and consequently at management, as rivalry. In order for us to succeed, we have to beat someone. Strategy is destructive; strategy is war.

Second, and equally troublesome, using our competitors as a way to define our course of action basically anchors us in the past. On reflection, this is an approach that seems counterproductive in a time of revolutionary change, when we want to create discontinuities, not reaffirm old practices. Is this what we should be aiming at in today’s turbulent environment, when change is virtually mandatory? We must challenge our previous state of business. We must have the ability to be creative and separate ourselves from the herd, to find a new and unique way of conducting business.

Often, companies seem obsessed with their competition, studying and watching it intensely to detect anything that could signal a way to operate more effectively.

This might not be a very smart way to manage. I tell my students, “Study your competition deeply, but do not imitate them.” I believe that strongly. It is a meaningful challenge. To separate ourselves from our competitors, we must offer our customers something that is truly unique and distinctive. How do we do that?

Third, the excessive concern about competitors can lead us, consciously or otherwise, into imitating their behavior. Our products begin to take on similar characteristics of those of the leaders. The development of our new products adheres to the prevailing standard of the industry, the channels of distribution that access our customer base are indistinguishable – in other words, the industry begins to converge into a well-established set of norms and standards. The result of this congruency leads toward the commoditization of our business, which is the worst possible outcome for all players."