Por motivos mesquinhos

O capítulo IV de "The End of Competitive Advantage" de Rita McGrath, intitulado "Using Resource Allocation to Promote Deftness" foi o que mais me impressionou.

"If you want to shape the way an organization behaves, an extraordinarily robust conclusion from academic research is that the resource allocation process is key. Firms built to thrive under transient-advantage conditions handle resources differently from firms designed for exploitation. In an exploitation-oriented firm, reliable performance, scale, and replication of processes from one place to another make a lot of sense because you can operate more efficiently and gain the benefits of scale. Resources, therefore, are directed to support these goals, and changing these resource flows is painful and difficult. A transient-advantage-oriented firm, on the other hand, allocates resources to promote what I call deftness - the ability to reconfigure and change processes with a certain amount of ease, quickly."

A parte que impressiona começa aqui:

"In a typical firm, resources are controlled by powerful existing businesses, and the powerful people are those who dominated the last-generation competitive advantage. That means that new opportunities are often force-fit into an existing structure, if they survive at all.
...
In a typical firm, every effort is made to squeeze as much operating margin out of existing assets as possible. In a transient advantage firm, people realize that the competitive life of an asset may be different from its accounting life, and move to retire those that are no longer competitive before they desperately have to.
...
a core implication of transient advantage is that what is good for a particular business may not be good for the organization as a whole. In a traditional company, people who had lots of assets and staff reporting to them were the important people in the company.
This idea was reinforced by systems such as the Hay Group’s point allocation, in which more pay and power were assumed to go to those managers with bigger operations. Indeed, just recently I was chatting with the head of talent development for a major publishing firm, who believes that this way of rating people is their single biggest obstacle to becoming a more nimble competitor. The bigger-is better mind-set is deadly in an environment in which advantages come and go. If people feel their authority, power base, and other rewards will be diminished if they move assets or people out of an existing advantage, they will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo."

Uma empresa pode perder o futuro por motivos mesquinhos, pela ostentação de status.
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E isto, de certo modo, também está relacionado com o que vejo em algumas PMEs. Empresas com uma certa dimensão e, por causa da evolução do mercado, têm uma rentabilidade medíocre por causa da sua constituição generalista. Encolher uma empresa, sobretudo num meio onde não somos anónimos como numa pequena ou média cidade, é visto como algo embaraçante ou mesmo vergonhoso. Assim, em vez de encolher a empresa e especializarem-se, continuam a manter uma estrutura desenhada para outros tempos.