"What a competitive strategy positions is a future offering"

Mais uns deliciosos trechos de "Creating Value Successful business strategies" de Shiv S. Mathur e Alfred Kenyon.

"The principal differences between the accounting and financial value concepts are the following:

• The accounts look backward. The financial markets by contrast are concerned with their estimates of future cash flows rather than with the past.

• The accounting framework takes no account of the cost of capital and the risk factor, or of the time value of money.

• The accounting approach contains the concept of the margin between price and cost in a given period. This concept is indispensable to the manager as a control ratio. However, margins, let alone period margins, play no part in defining financial value.

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What a competitive strategy positions is a future offering: tomorrow’s triangular relationship with tomorrow’s customers and competitors, not today’s. Today’s competitors and their present positions, and today’s customers and their preferences, are of interest only as pointers to tomorrow’s configuration.
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The fact that profits come from competitive strategy is self-evident when put in these simple terms. Yet it is quite startlingly different from the way profitability is widely discussed. It is not common to read in directors’ reports to shareholders, or in chairmen’s reviews of the year, that the toilet soap division had taken a bath due to the lack of good competitive strategies 3 years earlier. [Moi ici: Os empresários tugas não são piores do que os outros] It is much more common to read about tough trading conditions, failure of governmental macroeconomic policy, unfavourable cost changes, or unfair dumping by a foreign competitor.
Financial value is of course created by corporate as well as competitive strategy."