Escalar montanhas

Ontem o dia começou com a revisão dos e-mails recebidos durante a noite. Um deles remetia-me para um artigo que comentei em Maio de 2021 no postal, "duas economias, diferentes realidades, diferentes meios de competir ou não competir" (parte II), o artigo é ""Competition on Rugged Landscapes: The Dynamics of Product Positioning" de Leon Zucchini."

Como escrevi aqui:

"Usar uma paisagem enrugada para explicar comportamentos observados no mercado é um clássico neste blogue."

Entretanto, durante a caminhada matinal comecei a leitura de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt. Como começa o livro? Como uma reflexão acerca da observação de gente a escalar uma parede nua só com as mãos.

"Climbers call such boulders “problems” and describe the toughest part as “the crux.” In the case of the Cul de Chien, you cannot get up with just strength or ambition. You have to solve the puzzle of the crux and have the courage to make delicate moves almost two stories above the ground.

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The first climber said that he chooses the climb having the greatest expected reward and whose crux he believes he can solve. In a flash of insight, I realize this describes the approaches of many of the more effective people I have known and observed. Whether facing problems or opportunities, they focused on the way forward promising the greatest achievable progress—the path whose crux was judged to be solvable.

I began to use the term crux to denote the outcome of a three-part strategic skill. The first part is judgment about which issues are truly important and which are secondary. The second part is judgment about the difficulties of dealing with these issues. And the third part is the ability to focus, to avoid spreading resources too thinly, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on the crux—the most important part of a set of challenges that is addressable, having a good chance of being solved by coherent action.

As with climbers, every person, every company, every agency faces both opportunities and obstacles to their progress. Yes, we all need motivation, ambition, and strength. But, by themselves, they are not enough. To deal with a set of challenges, there is power in locating your crux—where you can gain the most by designing, discovering, or finding a way to move through and past it."

A paisagem pode ser modificada pelas empresas

Demasiadas vezes olhamos para a paisagem competitiva como uma constante do desafio.
Na verdade, a paisagem competitiva não é um dado constante. Ela está sempre a mudar. Ainda ontem a notícia sobre a taxa de 25% que os EUA vão aplicar sobre as importações de queijo e fruta, representa uma alteração da paisagem imposta por agentes muito poderosos.
O que esquecemos muitas vezes é que as próprias empresa podem agir, elas próprias, para alterar a paisagem competitiva onde actuam.

"For purposes of understanding shaping in strategy, the idea that organisms can alter their selection environments and those of their descendants has obvious appeal.
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In biology, organisms shape elements of the selection environment that affect survival. But in strategy, firms generally have a different proximate goal—they seek profits—and they take action directed toward this goal. Thus, for firms, the relevant selection criteria are those that determine profits and payoffs to specific courses of action.We can think of the selection criteria for profit-seeking firms as encoded in the payoff structure that maps particular firm actions or decisions or attributes (e.g., activities, resources, and capabilities) to the payoffs that ensue. In this sense, shaping the selection environment in strategy means shaping the payoff structure for all firms operating in that environment. In NK terms, firms generate or modify the “fitness function,” which lies behind the topology of the fitness landscape that all firms climb in search of profit opportunities. Similarly, in the context of strategic interactions, shaping the business context means that a firm or firms playing a competitive game endogenously generate or modify the payoff structure for all firms in the game, such as by altering the payoffs to particular moves or the types of moves available.
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1. Shaping can have major direct effects on the performance of a shaper and its position on the business landscape, i.e., its competitive advantage.
2. As a corollary, shaping can also have direct implications for the competitive advantage of competitors. In addition to improving the focal firm’s position, shaping can directly undermine other firms’ positions on the landscape by affecting the bases of their competitive advantage.
3. Highly malleable business landscapes may hide subtle dangers for shapers because high malleability leads to more frequent shaping. Although firms may be individually rational when shaping the business context in an effort to improve their performance, their independent actions may collectively lead to overshaping and long-run instability in performance for all firms.
4. Overshaping is not independent of the number of firms of the shaping type in the population. Unless shaping involves joint action by a group of firms (a case that the model does not contemplate), ceteris paribus the fewer the number of shapers, the greater the benefits from shaping activity.
5. The sustainability of competitive advantage is likely to be highest in situations of moderate to high complexity (K) combined with a low to moderate number of dimensions available for shaping (E). Under these conditions, any advantage obtained through shaping is less likely to be undermined by shaping on the part of other firms and is more likely to be sustained due to complexity."

Trechos retirados de "Searching, Shaping, and the Quest for Superior Performance" de Giovanni Gavetti, Constance E. Helfat e Luigi Marengo, publico por Strategy Science, Volume 2, Issue 3, September 2017, Pages ii, 141-209

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte III)

Parte I e Parte II.

"The decision of where on the landscape firms should position their products is at the core of product positioning. By deciding what attributes to include in the product and what uses of the product to promote, firms guide the customers’ understanding of the new product’s comparison set, i.e., the appropriate demand landscape for the product. Firms’ emphasis on a subset of product attributes helps the customers determine the product’s location on the relevant demand landscape and the customers’ WTP for the product.
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Competitor products can serve as referents for the introduction of new products and repositioning of existing products. Depending on the competitors’ positioning in relation to the customers’ ideal points, firms may pursue either differentiation or imitation strategies.
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Four conditions are useful for thinking about how firms decide when to move on the demand landscape and when to reshape the landscape: weak connection between product attributes and performance, large number of attributes used by the customer to evaluate products, opportunity for collective action, and fragmentation of buyers and suppliers. Both firms that are constrained in their product-attribute choices and firms that have exhausted their repertoires of product modification options can pursue profits by attempting to change the shape of their demand landscapes.
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Firms that are limited in their product modification options, e.g., generic drug manufacturers, may be especially likely to turn to landscape-shaping strategies in order to promote their products."

Trecho retirado de  "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products". 

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte II)

Parte I.

"A long-standing tradition in strategy conceptualizes the firm's operating environment as a fitness landscape. In this conceptualization, the firm’s performance is an outcome of searching the landscape for an optimal position. ... More recent contributions to this literature put forward the possibility of firms not just searching a landscape shaped by other actors, but also reshaping the landscape, i.e., changing the topology of the landscape to improve a focal firm’s position on the landscape and, with it, the firm’s performance. This suggestion expands the repertoire of strategies available to firms.
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To date the research on demand landscapes has taken the shape of the landscape as a given, implicitly assuming that firms operate on exogenously determined landscapes (i.e., firms’ only option is to change products to accommodate customer preferences). Taking a different perspective, I propose that firms can reshape the demand landscapes for their products (i.e., change customer preferences to accommodate their products).
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I consider two approaches to landscape reshaping by firms—1) moving the customer’s ideal point and 2) manipulating the customer’s perception of the distance between the customer’s ideal point and the firm’s product.
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My starting point is the demand landscape —a concept that describes the distribution of customer preferences in terms of customers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for different combinations of product attributes. ... In my conceptualization, the demand landscape represents a mapping from product attribute combinations (product positions) to customers’ WTP for these combinations."

Trecho retirado de  "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products".

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte I)

Usar uma paisagem enrugada para explicar comportamentos observados no mercado é um clássico neste blogue.

Por exemplo, recordar "Acerca da Totoestratégia" de Julho de 2012 ou "O modelo NK de Kauffman - uma introdução" de Dezembro de 2010:

Empresas que procuram subir na paisagem competitiva em busca de melhores retornos ou menos ameaças e que têm de estar alerta porque, quando menos se espera, o espaço onde se movem altera-se, e a posição onde se aterra pode significar a morte, ou pelos menos muita dor.

Depois, com Nenonen e Storbacka, assume-se que as empresas podem ser elas próprias a alterar a paisagem competitiva em seu benefício. Os mercados não são, vão sendo "markets are not – they become" de Março de 2015:

• Não é armadilhar, é criar harmonia, é construir uma sinfonia... (Julho de 2011)
• Scripting markets (Abril de 2014)
• Driving markets (Maio de 2014)
• "The key source of success is to conceive the VCS and make it work" (Setembro de 2017)
• Market shaping (Janeiro de 2018)
• Assumir o desafio de mudar um mercado (parte IV) (Janeiro de 2018)
• "You can’t shape your customer" (Abril de 2018)

Agora encontro "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products":

"I suggest that in addition to repositioning their products to accommodate customer preferences firms also change the distribution of customer preferences to accommodate the firms’ products.
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Specifically, I argue that firms alter customer preferences by adding, removing, and transforming the dimensions of the demand landscape.
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Managers often assume that customer tastes are fixed and that the only way to improve a product’s appeal to customers is to change the products’ attributes to better accommodate the customers’ preferences. In this paper, I consider two approaches firms can take to changing customer preferences to better accommodate their products. One approach is to convince the customers that the combination of attributes offered by a focal product, e.g., the Apple iPhone is more valuable than the combination of attributes a customer is used to consuming. An alternative approach is to manipulate the customer’s perception of similarity between a product she is used to buying and the focal firm’s product."

Relacionar também com a sugestão "mudar de clientes", de mudar de vida.

Continua.

Complex Adaptive Systems: 15 Fitness Landscapes

Pós pico da globalização...

Gosto das ideias de Ghemawatt acerca da globalização.
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Aliás, Ghemawatt não acredita que exista uma globalização, defende que existe uma semiglobalização.
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As ideias de Ghemawatt são compatíveis com o meu planeta Mongo, um planeta com uma paisagem competitiva super-enrugada.
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A minha última encomenda de leitura foi "World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It". Hoje, verifico que a The Economist faz uma análise ao livro:
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"Far from “ripping through people’s lives”, as Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer, claims, globalisation is shaped by familiar things, such as distance and cultural ties. Mr Ghemawat argues that two otherwise identical countries will engage in 42% more trade if they share a common language than if they do not, 47% more if both belong to a trading block, 114% more if they have a common currency and 188% more if they have a common colonial past.
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What about the “new economy” of free-flowing capital and borderless information? Here Mr Ghemawat’s figures are even more striking. Foreign direct investment (FDI) accounts for only 9% of all fixed investment. Less than 20% of venture capital is deployed outside the fund’s home country. Only 20% of shares traded on stockmarkets are owned by foreign investors. Less than 20% of internet traffic crosses national borders."
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"That FDI fell from nearly $2 trillion in 2007 to $1 trillion in 2009 can be put down to the global financial crisis. But other trends suggest that globalisation is reversible. (Moi ici: Tenho escrito sobre a Torre de Babel, sobre a proximidade, sobre a vantagem da rapidez) Nearly a quarter of North American and European companies shortened their supply chains in 2008 (the effect of Japan’s disaster on its partsmakers will surely prompt further shortening)."
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Mongo, Mongo por todo o lado "Mr Ghemawat also explodes the myth that the world is being taken over by a handful of giant companies. The level of concentration in many vital industries has fallen dramatically since 1950 and remained roughly constant since 1980: 60 years ago two car companies accounted for half of the world’s car production, compared with six companies today.
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He also refutes the idea that globalisation means homogenisation. The increasing uniformity of cities’ skylines worldwide masks growing choice within them, to which even the most global of companies must adjust."
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"In general companies frequently have more to gain through exploiting national differences — perhaps through arbitrage—than by muscling them aside." (Moi ici: Aqui os teimosos que nos querem impor um acordo ortográfico não percebem como a cultura podem ser uma poderosa barreira para proteger os mais pequenos... já o escreveu Peter Schwartz "There will be economic reasons for each nation to keep its unique culture intact.")

Este é o tempo para repensar a estratégia (parte II)

Escreve Greg Satell "Beware of consultants bearing gifts".
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No artigo o autor refere dois gráficos:

Dois gráficos retirados de Shift Index report (pdf) e que mostram como as rentabilidades das empresas têm evoluído negativamente nos últimos 40 anos.

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STOP!

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Vamos agora recuar a este postal que escrevi em Outubro de 2008 "Que futuro?" e a este escrito em Dezembro de 2008 "Este é o tempo para repensar a estratégia (parte I)" onde escrevi que dado que o dinheiro vai ficar mais caro, as empresas vão ter de se concentrar no aumento da sua rentabilidade, senão não vale a pena ter a empresa aberta, o dinheiro rende mais no banco.

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Pois Greg Satell, em vez de olhar para o futuro como fiz, olha para o passado e explica a evolução dos gráficos... é a imagem no espelho do que eu previ para o futuro.

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Fica bem salientar "The carry trade never dies" e recordar "Como eu olho para a crise" para enquadrar:

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"Since the 1960’s management consultants have been encouraging companies to leverage more debt against stockholders equity in order to lower their cost of capital. This has resulted in lower financing costs and a requisite increase in assets that company owners have under their control.

It was foreseeable that a widespread increase in leverage and a decrease in capital costs would lower overall return on assets, so it’s not surprising that the metric is falling. What is surprising is that now management consultants are holding falling ROA up as evidence of an overall decline in business operations."
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De qualquer forma, mais actual do que nunca: Este é o tempo para repensar a estratégia (série).
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Basta atentar neste retrato das sociedades não-financeiras em 2009 em Portugal segundo o INE:

Uma casca de noz que é arrastada no tsunami dos eventos, ou Agarrem-me senão eu mato-me (parte II)

Continuado da parte I.

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Na parte I recordei o que significa apostar tudo na exploitation em detrimento da exploration, e escrevi:

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"Recentemente voltei a recordar neste espaço as palavras de March sobre a exploitation e a exploration. Quando uma empresa se concentra demasiado, quando aposta tudo na exploitation, está a aderir a um modelo mental que assume que o dia de amanhã vai ser igual ao dia de hoje, acredita que o que resulta hoje continuará a resultar amanhã..."

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Entretanto, no livro "The Design of Business - Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage" de Roger Martin encontro:

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"If the goal of the reliability-oriented business is to ensure that tomorrow consistently and predictably replicates yesterday, then it follows that the business will be organized as a permanent structure with long-term ongoing job assignments (Moi ici: Até tremo a ler isto... esta confiança no permanente... um reich que durará mil anos). Daily work will consist of a series of permanent, continuous tasks: make stuff, sell it, ship it, follow up with customers, and service the installed base. There are few if any limited-term projects on the organizational chart, and for good reason.

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Roger Martin cita um artigo de Mihnea Moldoveanu, "Reliability Versus Validity: A Note on Prediction" de onde destaco:

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"The problem of going from reliability... is, of course, the "all things being equal" condition that appears in most experimental reports and empirical study results, which states that the supposed cause-effect relationship supported by the data will be operational in other contexts, "all things being equal." But that is precisely the point of living in an open, uncontrolled system, also known as the world: all things are not equal from one experimental run to another."

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Aqui e aqui abordei o tema da fitness landscape ou business landscape em permanente mutação, e também já abordei o Jogo da Vida de Lindgren, permanentemente há picos elevados que caminham para depressões e vice-versa, depressões que crescem para picos.

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Pois bem, ontem, encontrei este artigo "Exploitation has diminishing returns: Roger Martin" que reforça o tema:

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"Once a company hits a winning formula, it tries to exploit it to the fullest. And therein lies the trap. “The problem is, exploitation has diminishing returns. And by focusing on what it already does, the company puts itself at risk of missing new opportunities and avoiding disasters that come from big changes in the environment. The folks at General Motors were focused on doing what they had always done and were almost destroyed by the changes they didn’t see coming. They had lots of past data to suggest they should keep making pick-ups and SUVs through 2008. But the world changed, and they just missed it,” says Roger Martin, a professor of strategic management and the Dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Martin, who recently authored The Design of Business— Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, spoke with Vivek Kaul recently about his concepts."

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As nossas empresas que não mudaram nada, que continuaram agarradas ao passado, que não viram ou não quiseram ver o mundo a mudar... estavam à espera de quê?

Que futuro?

Em Julho passado, utilizei esta figura, no postal "Não há almoços grátis: Há que optar ", para resumir as principais conclusões do artigo "No Free Lunch: How Strategic Position Relates to Profitability and Failure" de Stewart Thornhill, Roderick White e Michael Raynor.
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Também em Julho passado, neste postal “Estratégias puras ou híbridas (parte I)” e neste outro “Estratégias puras ou híbridas (parte II)” fiz referência ao artigo “Strategic Purity: A Multi-Industry Evaluation of Pure vs. Hybrid Business Strategies”, publicado no Strategic Management Journal (2007, pp. 553-561) da autoria de Stewart Thornhil e Roderick White.
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Thornhill e White focam sobretudo a relação entre pureza estratégica e rentabilidade: as empresas que seguem estratégias puras têm uma rentabilidade superior à das empresas híbridas que seguem estratégias de meio-termo. Contudo, as estratégias puras estão associadas a mais risco e maior taxa de mortalidade dos negócios.
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Perante os sobressaltos a que temos assistido no mundo financeiro, podemos equacionar uma hipótese de trabalho sobre o panorama futuro onde as empresas, os estados e as famílias se irão movimentar. Consideremos o efeito do crédito:
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A "disponibilidade de capital barato para investir" será tanto maior (+), quanto maior o grau de facilidade de obtenção de crédito e, quanto menor (-) as taxas de juro a que esse crédito é concedido.
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Quanto maior (+) a "disponibilidade de capital barato para investir", menor (-) será a rentabilidade necessária para o break-even de um investimento.
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Assim, num mundo com break-even mais reduzidos, as empresas podem apostar em estratégias híbridas menos arriscadas (menores taxas de mortalidade), mas com menores taxas de rentabilidade.
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Pelo contrário, se o crédito se tornar mais escasso e com taxas de juro superiores, as empresas terão de apostar em estratégias com um maior grau de pureza, risco e taxas de mortalidade mais elevadas, mas taxas de rentabilidade mais atractivas.
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Até que ponto a "disponibilidade de capital barato para investir" seguirá de forma sustentada no futuro o sinal + ou o sinal - ?
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Se o sinal for - é bom que as empresas formulem e executem estratégias que visem maiores taxas de rentabilidade, ou seja, estratégias puras que implicam: melhor definição de quem são os clientes-alvo; de qual é a proposta de valor; de qual é a vantagem competitiva, de qual é o valor criado; de qual é a estratégia a seguir e de como assegurar a sua implementação.
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Sair fora do corpo e reframing, reframing e reframing. Se voltarmos aos montes e vales das business landscape e fittness landscapes de Kauffman, Ghemawat, os modelos de Lindgren e Beinhocker é fácil imaginar n negócios que estavam no topo de um pico e que se estão a afundar perigosamente até ao nível dos vales onde a neblina envenenada elimina os concorrentes menos afortunados.
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Alguns elementos para a reflexão:

• Última página do caderno principal do semanário Expresso de 11 de Outubro - "Empresas de obras públicas não querem novas obras";
• "Crise "seca" acesso das empresas ao crédito" artigo de Luísa Pinto e Ana Rute Silva no Público de ontem ("O problema não é só o dinheiro estar mais caro, face à subida das taxas de juro. O problema também é que está mais difícil arranjá-lo.");
• "CGD empresta 200 milhões de euros ao BPN" artigo de Paula Cordeiro e Renato Santos no DN de ontem;
• "Consumer credit" artigo de Ricardo Arroja no blogue "Pedro Arroja Grupo Financeiro";
• "For Europe, the credit crunch is here" artigo no International Heral Tribune;
• "Crise financeira afasta famílias do crédito rápido" artigo de Alexandra Figueira no sítio do Jornal de Notícias;
• "Spain's Showy Debt Collectors Wear a Tux, Collect the Bucks" artigo no The Wall Street Journal.

A minha solução não passa por aqui (II)

Continuado daqui.
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Acredito na virtude da destruição criativa. A remoção de empresas não competitivas liberta espaço competitivo (recursos) para quem pode competir de forma sustentada, pelo menos durante mais alguns anos, até que o espaço, o contexto competitivo se altere, ou seja alterado por novos actores, ou por actores que entretanto se reformularam e adoptaram posicionamentos comparativamente mais vantajosos.
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Ou seja, menos apoios e menos subsídios, e mais sangue empresarial na calçada!
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"Want faster European growth? Learn to love creative destruction" de Nicholas Crafts: "There is substantial evidence that competition and potential entry promotes productivity growth in today's European economies."
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"Appropriate Growth Policy: A Unifying Framework" de Philippe Aghion e Peter Howitt: "the idea here is that increased entry, and increased threat of entry, enhance innovation and productivity growth, not just because these are the direct result of quality-improving innovations from new entrants, but also because the threat of being driven out by a potential entrant gives incumbent firms an incentive to innovate in order to escape entry, through an effect that works much like the escape-competition effect described above. Note that it is important here that new entrants replace incumbent firms, in other words that entry be associated with firm turnover."
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Ou como referem Richard Foster e Sarah Kaplan no livro "Creative Destruction - Why Compamires That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them":
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"the idea here is that increased entry, and increased threat of entry, enhance innovation and productivity growth, not just because these are the direct result of quality-improving innovations from new entrants, but also because the threat of being driven out by a potential entrant gives incumbent firms an incentive to innovate in order to escape entry, through an effect that works much like the escape-competition effect described above. Note that it is important here that new entrants replace incumbent firms, in other words that entry be associated with firm turnover."
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"the idea here is that increased entry, and increased threat of entry, enhance innovation and productivity growth, not just because these are the direct result of quality-improving innovations from new entrants, but also because the threat of being driven out by a potential entrant gives incumbent firms an incentive to innovate in order to escape entry, through an effect that works much like the escape-competition effect described above. Note that it is important here that new entrants replace incumbent firms, in other words that entry be associated with firm turnover."
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Afinal o que é que aconteceu nos últimos anos ao nosso têxtil e calçado? Incapazes de competir numa nova paisagem competitiva, muitas empresas fecharam, para dar lugar a empresas que se posicionaram em novas zonas do espaço competitivo, empresas com outras armas, com outras estratégias e com outros níveis de produtividade.
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Mais importante ainda do que o aumento das qualificações das pessoas é a renovação do tecido empresarial como se ilustra no exemplo finlandês:
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"It is widely believed that restructuring has boosted productivity by displacing low-skilled workers and creating jobs for the high skilled."
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Mas, e como isto é profundo:"In essence, creative destruction means that low productivity plants are displaced by high productivity plants." Por favor voltar a trás e reler esta última afirmação.
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E o grande finale:"As creative destruction is shown to be an important element of economic growth, there is definitely a case for public policy to support this process, or at least avoid disturbing it without good reason. Competition in product markets is important. Subsidies, on the other hand, may insulate low productivity plants and firms from healthy market selection, and curb incentives for improving their productivity performance. Business failures, plant shutdowns and layoffs are the unavoidable byproducts of economic development."
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No próximo postal vamos abordar uma possível explicação para a aridez das propostas que só conseguem olhar para os custos ou para soluções como o arranque da vinha, ou o abate de barcos (típicas da Comissão Europeia e suportadas por paletes e resmas de relatórios muito racionais).
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O animal adaptativo

Já não me recordo como foi, mas por causa do meu costume de pesquisar as fontes bibliográficas cheguei a um livro interessante “The social atom – Why the rich get richer, cheaters get caught, and your neighbor usually looks like you” de Mark Buchanan.
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Uma vez que prego a descrença nos acasos e a crença na necessidade de mergulhar e procurar os padrões de comportamento que se escondem abaixo da superfície da realidade, foi com gosto que apreciei a designação do primeiro capítulo “Think Patterns, Not People”. Quem me conhece sabe o quanto comungo da máxima “A culpa é do sistema”
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“The central idea of this book is that the only way to understand a sudden explosion of ethnic nationalism, a peculiar link between women’s education and birth control, entrenched racial segregation, and a host of other important or just plain interesting social phenomena – in financial markets, in politics, in the world of fashion – is to think of patterns, not people.”
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O livro faz referência ao artigo “Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem), por W. Brian Arthur.
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Alguns trechos do livro, tendo em conta o artigo, são:
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“… the way people make most decisions has little to do with logic, and a lot to do with using simple rules and learning by trial and error. In particular, people try to recognize patterns in the world and use them to predict what might come next.”
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“… people tend to hold a number of hypotheses in their heads at once, and to act on whichever seems to be making the most sense at the time.”
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Agora vem uma citação que parece retirada de Karl Weick: “One of the best ways to go about a task, anything from putting up some shelves to finding a job, is often to just get started, even if you have no clear idea of the best way to proceed. You try something, then you learn and adapt. “The world,” as Jacob Bronowski once put it, “can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.” Following this way of thinking, Arthur replaced rationality with a view of people as acting on the basis of simple theories, while adapting along the way.”
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“… we’re adaptive rule followers, rather than rational automatons. But the model is surprisingly realistic.”
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“We are alive today because our ancestors had hardwired into their behavior a set of simple rules for making decisions that gave pretty good results – enough for their survival – but have little to do with rational calculation.”
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Capítulo após capítulo deste livro, dou comigo a repetir a frase “I love this game”.
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Aprecio esta flexibilidade mental. Cada vez mais acredito que o mundo é composto por paisagens adaptativas (fitness landscapes, business landscapes), que se movimentam cada vez mais rapidamente e que são implacáveis com estruturas lentas, ultrapassadas e agarradas a direitos adquiridos.

Relações (3/5)

Continuado daqui.
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Não há mal que sempre dure e bem que nunca acabe, ou como as estratégias são sempre transitórias (e duram cada vez menos)

Consideremos um capitalista, um detentor de capital, uma entidade singular ou colectiva, que pretende investir o seu dinheiro para obter um dado retorno.
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Onde investir?
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Trecho que se segue adaptado de “Strategy and the Business Landscape” de Pankaj Ghemawat
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É possível desenhar um gráfico onde se procura evidenciar que o sector de actividade onde um dado negócio opera, tem uma influência importante na rentabilidade potencial desse negócio.
A figura que se segue ilustra a extensão em que a rentabilidade média de um negócio pode depender do sector de actividade.
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O eixo vertical mede a rentabilidade, após retirada dos custos do capital, o eixo horizontal mede a dimensão de cada sector, em termos de capital investido.
A figura acima permite relacionar rentabilidade de um negócio em função de uma opção: o sector de actividade.
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A figura que se segue ilustra uma situação em que a rentabilidade é função de dois tipos de escolhas, a B e a C.
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As escolhas podem ser: onde competir (ao longo de uma dimensão) e como competir (ao longo da outra dimensão).
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A maior parte dos negócios podem ser melhor descritos como se operassem num espaço com n-dimensões de escolhas, onde cada localização nesse espaço representa uma diferente estratégia para o negócio – ou seja, um diferente conjunto de escolhas sobre o que fazer e como fazê-lo.
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Uma business landscape representa a altitude, como a rentabilidade económica resultante do conjunto de opções estratégicas de um negócio. Assim, o desafio estratégico central é o de guiar um negócio para um ponto suficientemente elevado nesta paisagem (landscape).
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O resto do segundo folhetim pode ser lido aqui
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Fontes aqui:

• “Strategy and the Business Landscape” de Pankaj Ghemawat;
• “O Universo, A Nossa Casa” de Stuart Kauffman;
• “The origin of Wealth” de Eric Beinhocker;
• “Explore/Exploit Strategies in Autonomy” de Stewart Wilson;
• “Exploration and Exploitation in organizational learning” de James March;
• “Plant diversity and ecosystem productivity: Theoretical considerations” de David Tilman, Clarence Lehman, e Kendall Thomson;
• “Hypercompetitive Performance: Are the Best of Times Getting Shorter?” de Robert Wiggin e Timothy Ruefli