Onde é que a sua empresa anda a queimar pestanas?

Há dias mencionei este artigo, "Creating Competitive Advantage", de Pankaj Ghemawat e Jan Rivkin, por causa das diferenças de rentabilidade inter e intrasectoriais.
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Hoje, volto a ele para sublinhar o aspecto das diferenças intra-sectoriais, algo que traz à baila a importância da estratégia, se duas empresas operam no mesmo espaço económico e sector, e têm diferentes desempenhos, a diferença deve estar relacionada com o que é diferente, com o interior de cada empresa e não com o meio abiótico:
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"Within-industry differences in performance are often larger than differences across industries, but it would be wrong to conclude that industry analysis is unimportant. Industry analysis is crucial to creating competitive advantage for several reasons. First, companies that generate competitive advantages typically do so by devising strategies that neutralize the unattractive features of their industries and exploit the attractive features. Second, industry conditions appear to have a large influence on whether competitive advantages are even possible.
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There are two basic ways a firm can establish an advantage. First, the firm can raise customers’ willingness to pay for its products without incurring a commensurate increase in supplier opportunity cost. Second, the firm can devise a way to reduce supplier opportunity cost without sacrificing commensurate willingness to pay. Either establishes the wider wedge that defines competitive advantage.
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a firm can achieve a competitive advantage by devising a way to (1) raise willingness to pay a great deal with only slight increases in costs or (2) reap large cost savings with only slight decreases in customer willingness to pay. We call the first a differentiation strategy and the second a low-cost strategy."
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A opção mais divulgada, a opção mais recomendada, a opção que muitos julgam ser a única disponível é a "low-cost". A opção que, por sinal, menos recomendamos neste espaço. Convém, por isso, recordar um artigo de 1992, "Identifying Mobility Barriers" de Richard Caves e Pankaj Ghemawat, e publicado pelo Strategic Management Journal, onde se pode ler:
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"differentiation play a significant role in generating sustained intraindustry profit differentials, and differences related to cost, a somewhat less significant one. We also uncover a tendency for differentiation-related advantages to be absorbed into fatter margins and (in some instances) larger market shares, while cost-related advantages are taken primarly in terms of increases in market share."
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BTW, recordar o que Hermann Simon escreveu sobre o lucro e a quota de mercado. Também não esquecer o grande ditado:
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Volume is vanity, profit is sanity.
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Onde é que a sua empresa anda a queimar pestanas? Na diferenciação, ou na redução de custos?