Risco e foco e passividade

Em Julho de 2008 desenhei este esquema:

Que chama a atenção para um dilema que algumas organizações podem viver. As exigências de rentabilidade, por exemplo pagar o custo do capital (algo pouco relevante nos dias de hoje), podem impor uma pureza estratégica, um grau de foco, que também aumenta o grau de risco. Mais risco mais rentabilidade. E uma organização pode ter muito sucesso aplicando uma estratégia pura até ao dia em que o mundo muda. Quando o mundo muda, a especialização anterior serve de barreira para a transformação necessária.

Entretanto, ontem li este trecho em "Images of Strategy" de Stephen Cummings e David Wilson:

"SWOT lists are also not particularly good at dealing with a complex and often paradoxical world. For example, once you have listed something as a strength then you can not really use it in another category; right? Looking at the mesh of self-referential arrows again one can recognize the problem with this sort of listing in terms of general classifications.

A company's greatest strength is paradoxically also its greatest weakness, and potentially its greatest threat. Its system of competitive advantage is so connected, such a tangled web, that it is ‘closed’. It knows very well what it does and how it does it, but does this come at the expense of not questioning this system as the environment in the ‘wider world’ changes? Being the best acquirer of low-tech mature manufacturing companies is a sustainable route to growth, so long as the environment remains constant and that market keeps expanding. What does a company do if it does not? Its strength is a clear vision of what it does. Its weakness is that this clarity of vision can, over time, diminish its ability to see other opportunities or develop other strengths. A company's greatest threat is that the environment will change without this being recognized, and without its strengths being questioned. Rather than discrete categories of separate points, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are very interrelated.

This double-edged sword of strengths potentially being weaknesses is often referred to as the Icarus Paradox. This is named after a character in Greek mythology who was so pleased with the wax wings that he had made that he kept flying up and up, increasing in confidence and proficiency – until he got so close to the sun that his wings melted and he fell to earth.

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This suggests that there is a need for companies to be very active in questioning their observations and conversations, their institutionalized frames and their traditional ways of thinking. When we combine this insight with the need to recognize that strategic management requires a relatively passive, tilting, pruning and trellising approach, we can see that strategists require quite a deft touch, one that is both active and passive. Within the boundaries of what is structurally possible, companies have to find ways of reinventing themselves as the world changes. Existing identities need to provide a springboard for developing new identities, while not acting as a set of unquestioned blinkers that blind people to radically changed external circumstances that might threaten the viability of the firm."