"lab or a factory"

O quanto eu gostaria de fazer chegar esta mensagem a tantas e tantas PME que ainda não aprenderam o truque e continuam a querer copiar o modelo gasto da "factory" que vêem descrito nos livros anglo-saxónicos, que vêem publicitado e louvado nos jornais económicos e nas revistas de gestão que só têm olhos para as empresas grandes, que vêem defendido pelos académicos de esquerda e pelos fósseis de direita ambos com o pensamento ainda no século XX:

"Businesses need to decide whether they want to be a lab or a factory.
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There are some clues into which one may work best in the new business environment when we review what each one is. The factory believes it already makes something that people want. It can’t handle dramatic changes to the product or the formula because it was built to make specific, predetermined things. The factory’s core focus is on scale, cost reduction and efficiency. It wants what it wanted yesterday, but cheaper and faster. The factory is the biggest investment the company makes. The people who work in and around it serve the factory, not the other way around. There’s very little room for movement, change or creativity. It’s more about the boxes of stuff to sell that come out the other end. The factory took a lot of money to invest in, so we need to churn out lots of stuff from it for a long time to get a payback. We’re in it for the long haul, and it will work out better for the factory if things don’t change too much.
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The lab knows the answer’s in there somewhere; it just doesn’t know what it is yet. Many experiments will be undertaken in order to find something that solves a certain problem, and while there are some ideas around solutions, there’s no answer just yet. The ingredients are flexible and easily changed, as are the methods being undertaken. The thing that really matters isn’t so much the ingredients, but the people mixing them up, the imagination they have and their interpretations of the possibilities. Each experiment they do leads to another idea and provides some real-world feedback as to how things interact. The focus is on human capital as opposed to financial capital, so we can have lots of labs working on different things at the same time and finding answers. If the lab fails it’s okay. It’s part of the learning process. And failures are very low cost. Every failure becomes an idea that can be crossed off the list and gets us closer to the answers we seek.
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In times of change it’s pretty clear that a lab mentality is what’s needed. The lab is an approach that doesn’t pretend to know the answers or believe that the world is stable. It’s an approach where the playbook is in fact to not pretend to know what’s next, but to understand that speed is the asset, creativity is greater than finance and collaboration is more powerful than control. The marketing model of the technology age is a model that must remain in a constant state of flux. What organisations need is a culture and structure that can cope with flux, one that revises how it goes to market based on what it learned today."

É que é mesmo isto. Lançar o equilíbrio para as malvas e abraçar o fluxo permanente. Recordo "A estabilidade é uma ilusão" (2010) e "A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte III)".

Trecho retirado de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino