Gabiche? (parte V)

Parte I, parte II e parte III e parte IV.

Quando olhamos para um ecossistema observamos diferentes espécies.

Qual a espécie mais bem sucedida?

Faz-me recuar a Beinhocker e ao seu fabuloso livro "The Origin of Wealth":

"Soon, something else began to happen in the pulsing soup of strategies— innovations began to appear. Mutations that added genes caused agent memory sizes to grow, thus enabling the agents to look further back in history and devise strategies that were more complex. Many of the mutants were nonsensical strategies that died off quickly. But, in general, more memory is a big advantage, and new strategies that were successful began to emerge and reproduce.
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So who was the winner? What was the best strategy in the end? What Lindgren found was that this is a nonsensical question. In an evolutionary system such as Lindgren's model, there is no single winner, no optimal, no best strategy. Rather, anyone who is alive at a particular point in time, is in effect a winner, because everyone else is dead. To be alive at all, an agent must have a strategy with something going for it, some way of making a living, defending against competitors, and dealing with the vagaries of its environment.
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Likewise, we cannot say any single strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma ecology was a winner."

Agora olhemos para as empresas como espécies, e para a paisagem competitiva como um espaço altamente enrugado:

O mainstream ainda vê a paisagem competitiva como ela era no paradigma do século XX. Ou seja, todas as empresas do mesmo sector de actividade competem entre si pelos mesmos clientes, com a mesma proposta de valor e em busca da máxima eficiência.

No entanto, em Mongo, para onde caminhamos, a paisagem competitiva é mais deste tipo:

Quanto mais alto se sobe na paisagem, maior a produtividade, maior o retorno.

As empresas que ocupam as posições A, B e C são competitivas, lideram o espaço que decidiram, ou que lhes calhou, ocupar. No entanto, a empresa C é muito mais produtiva que a empresa A e a empresa B. E apesar de mais produtiva, a empresa C não faz sombra às empresas A e B.

"Knowledge@Wharton: You give the example of what occurred long ago between Steinway and Yamaha. Can you tell us about that?
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Yu: That is an interesting story precisely because executive managers sometimes push back on my argument and say, “I don’t care about copycats. As long as I can provide the best product in the world, I will be all right.” So, I explored Steinway & Sons. They make the best concert piano, no doubt. Yet if we’re looking at the historical financial return of the company, it is a disaster. The company was listed, went private again, was listed again and was forced to go private again. They went from a peak of 6,000 pianos sold per year down to 2,000. Today, they are reduced to one single factory. They still make the best piano. Their workers are passionate, and yet they were disrupted by Japan’s Yamaha.
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A note to this story is there is no change of technology. It’s not like digital photography destroying Kodak. A piano is still a piano — it’s a hammer striking a string. But if the knowledge is stagnating; no matter how good you are, the latecomer can come in and leverage the scale of the economy, automation and lower cost structure, disassembling your product and reverse engineering. Over time, they would surpass the industry pioneer. I thought it was a cautionary tale: Try to avoid getting trapped in a golden cage."

Trecho retirado de "How Businesses Can Stay a Step Ahead of Copycats"