Porque falta a paciência estratégica

Há muitos anos que aqui no blogue escrevo sobre os gringos e a sua tradicional falta de paciência estratégica.

• O avatar
• Acerca da falta de paciência estratégica
• Mais produtividade não implica mais salário^
• Fazer o by-pass ao país

Agora, em "Beyond competitive advantage : how to solve the puzzle of sustaining growth while creating value" de Todd Zenger, encontro uma interessante justificação para isso:

"the primary path to value creation results from the creative, theory-building capacities of managers—those hired to see things investors often cannot.
...
the CEO’s task is to make strategic choices that will maximize the firm’s long-run profitability, even if capital markets fail to see this value in the short run. After all, the CEO is hired to be smarter than investors. The challenge is convincing investors this is true—a task made all the more challenging because frequently it simply isn’t; sometimes managers’ theories are bad, aimed at building empires and not value.
...
The quality of a corporate theory is massively difficult to assess—the product is a mere cognitive vision of a path to sustained value creation. A more difficult-to-evaluate product is hard to imagine; the true value is unknown even to the manager and is revealed only as “experiments” or strategic actions are pursued over a period of years. Accordingly, managers can all too easily disguise poor-quality theories as high-quality ones.
...
managers are paid to know more than capital markets about the quality and future value of their theories, but they are often incapable of persuasively articulating that inherent future value. As a consequence, high-quality theories paradoxically may be discounted in capital markets, especially when they are difficult to evaluate.
The big problem with such discounting is that managers rely on capital markets for resources to pursue their corporate theories. Perceptions of low quality elevate financing costs. Moreover, managers’ compensation and continued employment typically depend on their capacity to generate market value in the present. Thus, this lemons problem leads to a strategic dilemma of massive significance. Managers may be tempted to pander to the beliefs and preferences of the capital markets rather than pursue the corporate theories that would maximize value for the firm.
...
my experience suggests that managers generally do face a real dilemma as they craft and then sell their corporate theories to capital markets. They can choose simple, familiar strategies that are easy for capital markets to decipher or they can choose complex, unfamiliar, or unique ones based on theories that are difficult toevaluate. In the latter case, valuation is costly, prone to error, and likely leads to a discount in the market.
...
four types of corporate theories that differ along two dimensions: quality and ease of evaluation. Type I theories—theories that are of high quality and easily evaluated—are clearly the preferred choice. However, such theories are unlikely to exist in great abundance since, as discussed, good theories are unique—and unique seldom means easy to evaluate. Type IV theories—theories that are of low quality and relatively opaque—are clearly to be avoided. The majority of options, however, are likely to be type II—theories that are lower in quality and therefore long-term value, but are easily evaluated and therefore may maximize investors’ current value— or type III—theories of high quality that maximize long-term value but are difficult to evaluate and are therefore discounted in the present. The correct choice is by no means obvious.
...

...
In capital markets, there are securities analysts who specialize in assessing the merits of each firm’s theory. Their task is to assemble information, monitor performance, and evaluate the quality and likely future performance of the theories that managers propose, as these provide information to investors through earnings forecasts and buy and sell recommendations.
...
Analysts, like all individuals, seek to allocate their effort in ways that generate the best return on their time invested. Covering more firms expands order flow and reduces the costs spent per firm in analysis. But to economize on the effort expended per firm, and thereby cover more, analysts prefer firms that are easy to analyze— in other words, those pursuing theories that are familiar and simple.
...
firms tend to reshape themselves through divestitures and spinoffs to essentially “match” the “categories” covered by analysts.
...
We examined the impact of a strategy’s uniqueness on the level of coverage and the premium or discount that it received in capital markets. We assumed that the most valuable corporate theories are built around uniqueness: either unique foresight about the value of a strategic bundle of assets, or the possession of unique assets that preclude others from enjoying similar value as they pursue complementary assets.
...
The bottom line is that this uniqueness paradox is pervasive even in the market for publicly traded firms. Choosing unique theories, which may maximize long-term value, will likely receive a discount in the present."

Assim, é natural que os incentivos para estratégias intuitivas, as baseadas no preço/custo, sejam a opção de base.

"Competir e ter sucesso no negócio do preço mais baixo não tem segredos, é a estratégia mais fácil e intuitiva de implementar."(fonte)

Agora, recordar o título, "Por que as grandes estratégias têm de ser fora da caixa"