Saltar da panela confortável não é para todos

"In organizations of any size, there will be dozens or hundreds of competing and often conflicting priorities. The discipline of honing priorities down to a handful can force a leadership team to surface, discuss, and ultimately make a call on the most consequential trade-offs the company faces in the next few years. When executives make the hard calls and communicate them through the ranks, they provide clear guidance on the contentious issues likely to arise when executing strategy. But making trade-offs among competing priorities is difficult — they are dubbed “tough calls” for a reason. Prioritizing different objectives results in “winners” and “losers” in terms of visibility, resources, and corporate support. Many leadership teams go to great lengths to avoid conflict, and as a result end up producing toothless strategic priorities.
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A common way to avoid conflict is to designate everything as “strategic” — one S&P 500 company, for example, listed a dozen strategic objectives. Another way leadership teams resist making difficult calls is by combining multiple objectives into a single strategic priority."

Conheço este filme, o medo de fazer trade-offs. O medo de ser pragmático, o medo de romper consensos, o medo de saltar da panela confortável para o frio:

Recordar van den Steen:

• Irreversibilidade - uma faca de dois gumes;
• Acerca da estratégia e da sua ausência;
• Acerca da estratégia - parte I;
• Acerca da estratégia - parte II;
• Acerca da estratégia - parte III

Trecho retirado de "Turning Strategy Into Results"

Schwerpunkt

"the reality is that strategy succeeds or fails based on how well leaders at every level of an organization integrate strategic thinking into day-to-day operations. This is less about complexity and more about practical focus.
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Being a strategic leader is about asking the right questions and driving the right dialog with your team. In doing so, you raise the team’s collective ability to be strategic. The more competent you become in asking these questions, the better positioned you are to drive progress for your team and your organization."

A ilusão da comunicação é terrível. E a força da focalização na execução de uma estratégia é tremenda.

A minha bitola é o schwerpunkt da blitzkrieg.

Trechos retirados de "Being a Strategic Leader Is About Asking the Right Questions"

Acerca dos processos

"Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly.
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processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied.
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Unlike resources, which are easily measured, processes can’t be seen on a balance sheet. If a company has strong processes in place, managers have flexibility about which employees they put on which assignments— because the process will work regardless of who performs it.
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Putting Jobs to Be Done at the center of your process changes everything about what an organization optimizes for.
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the right job spec leads to the right processes that will generate the right data to know “How are we doing?” Jobs Theory focuses you on helping your customers do their jobs, rather than narrow internally measured efficiencies."

Leio isto e recordo:

• processos críticos vs processos contexto;
• fiambreiras e Bruce Jenner;
• mapa de actividades;
• finalidade dos processos;
• abordagem por processos

Trechos retirados de "Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice"

Papéis de uma estratégia

O papel da estratégia bem resumido:

"Strategy serves as a link between an organization, with its goals and values, resources and skills, structure and organizational systems, and the external environment, with its competitors, customers, and suppliers. At the same time, it is a model or a guideline that gives coherence to the decisions made by the enterprise or the individual.
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Often, the situation in which the decision-maker makes decisions is characterized by limited rationality and knowledge of the problem and of the existing options.
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Three main roles can be identified for strategy: it helps to simplify the decision-making process, to set goals, and to coordinate the actions to be undertaken to reach these goals."

Simplifica o processo de tomada de decisão porque enquadra as decisões a tomar permitindo uma resposta intuitiva a uma dinâmica externa.
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Ajuda a estabelecer objectivos que façam sentido para orientar o caminho para o futuro desejado e para reconhecer que se chegou, ou não, a esse futuro desejado.
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E coordena as acções a tomar, permitindo coordenar pessoas e recursos através de iniciativas alinhadas que transformam a realidade, que ajudam a formar o mosaico de trade-offs que dificultam a sua cópia.

Trecho retirado de "Business Strategies and Competitiveness in Times of Crisis - A Survey on Italian SMEs" de Laura Gavinelli.

McDonald's - As minhas cartas em cima da mesa (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.
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A parte I já dava para intuir algumas das afirmações deste texto "McDonald's franchisees say the brand is in a 'deep depression' and 'facing its final days'":

""The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise. We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle.
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"The lack of consistent leadership from Oak Brook is frightening, we continue to jump from one failed initiative to another," one franchisee wrote.
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"The system is very lost at the moment," one franchisee wrote. "Our menu boards are still bloated, and we are still trying to be too many things to too many people.
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Franchisees also criticized the "Create Your Taste" program, which allows people to customize their burgers with premium ingredients.
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"They are throwing everything they can against the wall to see what will stick," one franchisee wrote."

 Recordar conceitos como mosaico de valor, como "activity-systems maps" ..., para chamar a atenção para o perigo destas derivas que não estão alinhadas com o ADN da empresa.

Atento às oportunidades emergentes

O essencial é pôr-se a caminho e estar atento às mensagens e sinais que vão chegando, para afinar a estratégia.

"As oportunidades multiplicam-se à medida que vão sendo aproveitadas"

"Originally, Facebook’s leaders saw it as a social network application. Only once Facebook grew large did the idea materialize to become a platform. So in 2007 the website’s APIs were opened to a world of developers who could independently create Facebook applications.
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Some have criticized Facebook for this haphazard evolution. Turns out, that is how most strategies emerge: Discovery trumps planning.
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For more evidence, go back and look at the strategic plan from years ago at your favorite successful company. There is a good chance that the company’s winning strategy won’t appear in that old plan.
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many entrepreneurial firms that discover a strategy better than the plan their founders once pitched.
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to “savor surprises” – to see deviations from plan as the fountainhead of opportunity. Seen this way, the strategic plan is just step one in the discovery process. Leaders that understand this truth do not pretend to know the solution in advance. Instead, they plan to discover."

Como quando se olha para a estratégia da Zara, ou da Southwest Airlines, ou da IKEA, parece tudo incrivelmente ajustado e fruto de trabalho de relojoeiro de precisão. Contudo, foi tudo fruto do acaso, do que se aprendeu quando as dificuldades surgiram.
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E recordando a minha ligação entre biologia e economia:

"nature evolves away from constraints, not toward goals"

Trechos retirados de "Discovery Trumps Planning, So Plan to Discover"

Acerca da monitorização do desempenho das organizações

Algumas reflexões interessantes sobre a monitorização do desempenho das organizações em "Measuring Organizational Performance as a Dependent Variable: Towards Methodological Best Practice":

"Implication 1: Measuring performance requires weighing the relevance of performance to focal stakeholders.
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Organizations are heterogeneous in their resources and capabilities and how and where they choose to use them. At the most basic level, small and large firms are likely to perform in quite different manners. Although linked by competition, these firms have very different resources and strategies. Evidence suggests that large organizations use both financial and nonfinancial performance measures, but favor financial measures. (Moi ici: Nem de propósito, em linha com "Concentram-se nos custos") Very small firms also use both financial and non-financial variables to measure their performance. In a cross-country survey, Laitinen and Chong found that small Finnish companies focused on profitability, product margins, customer satisfaction and liquidity. Small UK companies were similar, giving less emphasis to overall profitability but also weighing debt levels highly. This evidence supported earlier findings by Davig and colleagues that product performance is more prominent in the evaluation of performance for small firms.
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Performance itself is likely to be somewhat firm specific: as the strategic choices a firm makes will dictate which performance measures will reflect the latent performance construct. Understanding how different independent variables link to a dependent performance variable is then no longer trivial. Assuming away this dimensionality will lead to misdirected or biased measurement.
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The relationship between measures and performance is also influenced by which measures the firm uses internally and how these are embedded into incentive and control systems within the firm; e.g., the firm’s own key performance indicators (KPIs).
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Implication 2: Measurement of performance must take into account heterogeneity of environments, strategies and management practices.
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A number of empirical studies have confirmed that performance itself does not persist indefinitely. This warns against the adoption of short or medium term measures, as these can be heavily biased by random fluctuations.
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Implication 3: Measurement of performance requires an understanding of the time series properties relating organizational activity to performance.
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Implication 5: Measurement of performance requires an understanding of the relationship between measures.(Moi ici: E pensa-se logo no mapa da estratégia)"

Recordar "Não existem BSCs tipo-template"

Estratégias emergentes

Quando se olha para o mapa da estratégia da Southwest Airlines, quando se olha para a sinergia conseguida no mosaico de actividades do seu “activity system map” 

não podemos deixar de apreciar a beleza do encaixe, o poder de alavancagem que tudo aquilo, a trabalhar em harmonia, traz.

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No entanto, podemos ser levados a pensar que tudo saiu de um esforço analítico bem amanhado.

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Resposta fácil, rápida e … errada.

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A Southwest Airlines era uma operadora com 3 aviões que voava no estado do Texas. A sua administração achou por bem comprar um quarto avião para poder fazer voos para fora do Texas. 

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Comprou-se o quarto avião, abriram novas rotas no estado do Texas e para fora dele e, tudo corria bem quando um juiz declarou que era ilegal a Southwest voar para fora do estado do Texas.

A empresa decidiu vender o quarto avião… mas não queria perder as novas rotas já abertas e a funcionar dentro do estado… mas só com três aviões era impossível… impossível?!

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Sim impossível, para conseguir manter essas rotas só com três aviões não poderiam demorar mais de 10 minutos com o avião parado na pista…

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Hummmm, talvez seja possível se …

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E, assim, emergiu uma das características base das verdadeiras low-cost, as únicas que ganham dinheiro, fazer tudo para que o avião esteja sempre no ar.

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“Good analysis is essential, but t’s a mistake, he argues, to think that a strategy should be fully defined in its entirety before the fact. There are simply to many variables and too much uncertainty to anticipate everything. Over time, in the course of serving its customers and vying with its rivals, an organization develops important insights about its strategy that it might not have had at the start. Over time, new opportunities emerge.”

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BTW, por que é que a Southwest conseguiu? Porque os seus administradores não tinham passado na indústria, não tinham as palas da tradição… como o suíço que produz azeite.

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Trecho retirado de "Understanding Michael Porter" de Joan Magretta.

Para macro-economistas, políticos e comentadores de coisas económicas

Parece retirado deste blogue:
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"Por que é que a Zara gosta tanto de Portugal?"

" Portugal é «absolutamente estratégico» para a Inditex, dona da Zara, tanto pela «proximidade» e pela flexibilidade dos seus produtores como pela qualidade do seu produto, afirmou esta quarta-feira o responsável da empresa."

Recordo o "activity system mapping" da Zara, recolhido de "Understanding Michael Porter" de Joan Magretta (sublinhados meus):

 O mundo do fast-fashion está aí, ainda está a crescer...
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Lembrar esta frase:
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"Há anos que escrevo aqui que a vantagem mais importante das nossas PMEs é a flexibilidade que a sua localização permite, muito mais importante que a flexibilidade laboral (importante sem dúvida nos momentos maus). A proximidade tem o potencial de gerar relação, gerar troca, gerar conhecimento sobre o outro, gerar cooperação, gerar parceria."

Estratégia na agricultura

Um artigo "From the boardroom to the farmers’ market: Using activity system mapping to explore a farmers’ market competitive advantage" várias notas (se os EUA servem de espelho para procurar ver o tal futuro que já cá está, embora mal distribuído):

• uma forma dos agricultores fugirem ao rolo compressor da grande distribuição, fazerem o by-pass a esses circuitos e desenvolverem mercados de venda directa 

"There are few recent success stories in North American agriculture that match the growth of direct marketing. The number of farmers’ markets in the United States, for example, tripled from 1,755 in 1994 to 5,274 in 2009 (USDA, 2009)."

• até na agricultura é preciso introduzir o pensamento estratégico
• até na agricultura é útil pensar no mosaico de actividades

"We believe that farmers’ market sponsors and managers often may be too immersed in day-to-day activities to step back and see the relationship of these activities and policy enforcement to the core competencies. Activity system mapping facilitates discussions on market policy, promotion, and competitiveness."

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"in order to be viable, farmers’ markets need to differentiate and establish a competitive advantage in the intense competition for food dollars facing farmers’ markets."

Nesta abordagem faria uma alteração, preocupar-me-ia muito mais com a caracterização de quem vai a estes mercados para, depois, fazer a batota que tanto aprecio: Seleccionar os clientes-alvo; desenhar uma proposta de valor e organizar um mosaico de actividades que usem e abusem da sinergia entre elas para materializar, naturalmente, a proposta de valor.