Flanquear os dinamarqueses e outros como eles

A propósito deste postal "Acerca da formulação da estratégia" acabei por ir reler alguns textos de Roger Martin. Um dos textos foi "Memo to JC Penney: Execution Is Not Strategy", ao ver o título recordei logo o que ficou por dizer em "Qual é a alternativa?" sobre "The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) for Danish Farms – Vague Framework or Functional Instrument?". Por isso, vamos à segunda leitura prometida:

"Seen from a BSC standpoint the “customer perspective” is only implicitly taken into consideration in the existing strategic planning concept. The much discussed development of agriculture from production driven markets to market driven production has obviously not yet had a fundamental impact on the farms’ management structure. The focus is mainly on the “internal processes perspective”.
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These results are not unexpected because agriculture traditionally has a very strong orientation of all its structure towards production, while the market or general outside orientation is much weaker.
Not at least for this reason the results show that the implementation of the (original) BSC concept into Danish agriculture has to be accompanied by a general shift in the business orientation."

Roger Martin escreve:

"But did JCP identify a set of shoppers with whom it could win — for whom JCP was their best alternative, to which they would look loyally for their shopping needs for some set of goods? Hardly.
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JCP doesn’t need someone who can “execute” successfully, get back to basics, or any such thing. Just as it needed two, five or ten years ago, JCP needs a strategy. It needs to decide where it is going to play — with what set of shoppers, in what range of merchandise, through what physical and digital spaces. And it needs to decide how is it going to provide a superior value proposition to competitive alternatives in that chosen space. This is a tough task. The department store business is a brutal one. This is not a business in which half-witted strategies can be profitable.
But if JCP doesn’t figure out an answer to these questions, it will revert entirely to the retailing drug — the “low-price strategy.” This is actually a non-strategy. There is a real strategy called “low-cost,” which can facilitate more attractive prices than competitors. But low prices unaccompanied by low costs is an approach to liquidation — which is where JCP will be if it doesn’t start to think intelligently about strategy."

 Um pragmático começaria a pensar não em como ser melhor que os dinamarqueses, mas em como ser diferente dos dinamarqueses. E em quem apreciaria essa diferença.
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Isso, se calhar, seria uma vantagem competitiva... eles não estão habituados a pensar estrategicamente... como para eles, por omissão, a proposta de valor é o preço mais baixo, aquilo a que chamam estratégia é, na verdade, operacionalização de melhoria incrementais de produtividade, de eficiência e de capacidade.