"enjoy the “quiet life.”"

"In competitive markets, managers have a strong incentive to give their best effort. But economists have long argued that when companies are insulated from competition, their managers may not be motivated to maximize the profit of the firm and instead may choose to enjoy the “quiet life.” Similarly, without sufficient monitoring by owners of the firms or the stock market, managers might be tempted to enjoy the quiet life instead of making hard decisions or taking on difficult tasks.
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Taken together, our results are consistent with the quiet life hypothesis. Without competition or monitoring, managers do seem to put off hard decisions."

Trechos retirados de "The “Quiet Life” Hypothesis Is Real: Managers Will Put Off Hard Decisions If They Can"

Acerca da evolução da competição (parte II)

Quando em "Acerca da evolução da competição" escrevi:

"Em próximo postal voltarei a Favaro e à minha reflexão pessoal sobre a evolução da estratégia."

Ainda não tinha lido "Terroir" de Seth Godin:

"Heinz ketchup has no terroir. It always tastes like everywhere and nowhere and the same. A Dijon mustard from a small producer in France, though, you can taste where it came from. Foodies seek out this distinction in handcrafted chocolate or wine or just about anything where the land and environment are thought to matter.
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But we can extend the idea to you, to your work, to the thing you're building.
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It's not like anyplace else. It's not like everyplace else.
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Consistent doesn't mean, "like everybody else."[Moi ici: Cá está o ponto que eu critico na Qualidade, a demasiada concentração na normalização]  Consistent in this case means, "like yourself." If we took just one drop of your work and your reputation and the trail you leave behind, could we reconstruct the rest of it?
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The pressure on each of us to fit in, to industrialize, to be more like Heinz--it's huge. But to do so is to lose the essence of what we make."

Terroir é uma palavra que o meu pai me ensinou acerca dos vinhos e da sua diferenciação... é uma palavra que vai ficar a fazer parte do léxico deste blogue e do meu trabalho. O que eu pensava acerca das palavras de Favaro, reforçado com o texto de Godin é o que relato aqui "O meio pode albergar posições intermédias viáveis".

Acerca da evolução da competição

Em "A Brief History of the Ways Companies Compete" Favaro faz um breve resumo da evolução dos grandes vectores de competição desde a Revolução Industrial:

"Since the late nineteenth century, we have seen five distinct movements in the way companies compete. The first was efficiency. This was the original purpose of forming corporations — to facilitate the production of products and services with the least amount of wasted time, materials, and labor. The attempt to turn business into a science of efficiency, also known as “Taylorism,” marked the high point of this movement. Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production.[Moi ici: Por favor, não me acusem de denegrir o "lean production", o "lean production" pode ser bom ou mau, como a caneta, mais aqui]
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The second movement was scale, a close cousin of efficiency. This is where companies exploit economies of scale that yield lower unit costs and enable sharper pricing of their goods and services.
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Scale and efficiency are mostly about competing by lowering costs. In the early 1980s, a new way of competing broke on to the world stage: the quality movement, with the deification of W. Edwards Deming, who introduced quality as a way of life for Japanese companies.
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Today quality, efficiency, and scale stand side-by-side as ways of competing. For every Wal-Mart and Ford that competes mostly on price, there’s a Nordstrom and BMW that competes mostly on quality. [Moi ici: Não posso concordar com Favaro. Favaro confunde qualidade como "ausência de defeitos" com qualidade como "algo com mais atributos". Não se pode dizer que a Nordstrom tem mais qualidade que a Wal-Mart se o conceito for a ausência de defeitos, assim como se pode dizer que o BMW tem mais qualidade que o Fiat se estivermos a falar na quantidade de atributos. Assim, a qualidade à la Deming, incluiria como mais uma ferramenta de redução de custos. Aliás, essa é a grande crítica que faço ao movimento da Qualidade, o ter cristalizado há muito no chão da fábrica, o ter ficado seduzida pela variabilidade, quando, o que conta cada vez mais é a variedade, daí o fim da marca Redsigma.]
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But after the rise of Japan proved not to be a miracle after all, and with the rise of the internet, a new, fourth movement was born in the 1990s: the network way of competing. Instead of winning customers based on cost or quality (or both), companies began to compete based on how many people (or businesses) use them. [Moi ici: Aquilo que Kaplan me ensinou a designar por estratégias lock-in]
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Today, the network movement has given way to a fifth: the so-called ecosystem way of competing. This an approach of co-opting third parties to build on and leverage your products and services such that they have more total utility to your customers. Your advantage comes not so much from the number of customers you have as from the number of partners you have working with or on top of your products and services."

Depois, Favaro termina a olhar para o futuro:

"All the above begs a question: Will we see any new ways of competing become a sixth movement in the corporate world? [Moi ici: E dá algumas ideias: Agility, disruption, data analytics, integration]
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Whether any of these become a full-blown movement or not, it’s clear that there’s a much bigger menu of ways to compete today compared to a century ago. That’s a good indication of how complex competing in the business world has become."

Este final fez-me logo pensar no paralelismo entre biologia e economia e, daí, chegar a "Mais estratégias, mais valor acrescentado, mais nichos, mais diversidade" e aos seus gráficos. E daí chegar a "Rethinking extinction":

"The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue."

Como não pensar em Feyrabend, quando se trata da sobrevivência, aprendemos com MacGyver, "anything goes":

"‘Genes are jumping around. Molecular genetics is finding that hybridisation between species is more common than previously suspected. Darwin talked about a tree of life, with species branching out and separating. But we are discovering it is more of a network, with genes moving between close branches as related species interbreed. This hybridisation quickly opens up evolutionary  opportunities.
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Move, adapt or die. When organisms challenged by climate change respond by adapting, they evolve. When they move, they often encounter distant cousins and hybridise with them, sometimes evolving new species.
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Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it."

Em próximo postal voltarei a Favaro e à minha reflexão pessoal sobre a evolução da estratégia.

Concorrência versus Clientes

Uma preocupação já por várias vezes referida neste blogue:

"As Peter Drucker emphasized, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” That’s also the purpose of any business strategy: make customers, not war. In my experience at strategy meetings, most executives spend too much time discussing competitors and not nearly enough time discussing customers: who they are, their key concerns, how they buy, why, and where."

Trecho retirado de "Stop Using Battle Metaphors in Your Company Strategy"

A treta do equilíbrio e a diferenciação inovadora

"to return to the idea of competition as a process of endogenous change driven by the differential behaviour of the competitors. A wide variety of economists have expressed their dissatisfaction with the equilibrium view in a number of ways, some less polite than others, (Moi ici: Só tolinhos académicos longe da vida real podem acreditar nessa treta do equilíbrio) and it will be as well to outline several of the main contributions. Thus, Morgenstern (1972) claims that competition as a word employed by economists has lost touch with reality simply because it has replaced struggle and rivalry with equilibrium. J.M. Clark (1961) in his major contribution to this literature began by claiming that the shift from equilibrium to process was the most challenging question in the theory of competition, and he suggested four broad elements necessary for effective competition: competent customers able to appraise accurately the competing products on offer; freedom of individuals and organizations to engage in any trade or activity; access to all the necessary means of production; and a climate of independence of attitude and strategy among firms in the industry."
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O que se segue é pura poesia, e está tão longe do que os media e a academia que faz parte dos painéis divulgam. Encostem-se e saboreiem o que é viver em Mongo:
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"Particularly interesting in his appraisal of competition theory is Georgescu-Roegen (1967) who points to the fact that, as normally portrayed, competition is absent within the industry and only takes place between industries,

the condition commonly labelled as a ‘perfectly competitive industry’ actually involves no competition at all. (p. 32)

Firms within a perfectly competitive industry only adjust passively to prices which are externally determined. As to what is needed in order to develop a theory of the competitive process we are encouraged to recognize that,

In every domain, but especially in economics, competition means in the first place trying to do things in a slightly different manner from all other individuals. (p. 33)

Here is an important clue as to how we are to proceed. We are to recognize that,

the most general form of competition among individual concerns is differentiation of product, involving a little innovation, not cut throat pricing. (p. 34) (Moi ici: Diferenciação é a solução)

Here is a major paradox: competition only becomes active when we allow a monopoly element premised upon the fact that firms are different, and scope for competition lies not in the number of firms but in the conditions creating diverse behaviour. (Moi ici: "Conditions creating diverse behaviour"... é o truque, fugir do Grande Planeador, apostar na biodiversidade... Hamel and Valikangas rule) In a sense, all the elements above were contained in Chamberlin’s Monopolistic Competition but for him the grip of equilibrium thinking was too strong. Brenner (1987) is also a notable contributor to this literature, with the emphasis being placed on bets upon new ideas and the insistence that,

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Businessmen pursue strategies to discover a combination of customers and services (Moi ici: Qual a cadeia da procura? Quem são os clientes-alvo e o que lhes oferecer?) with respect to which they have an advantage over those who they perceive as their competitors. (p. 49)

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Among all the economists who have been critical of the equilibrium approach none has been more devastating from my perspective than Hayek (1948, 1978) with his view that an equilibrium concept of competition is a contradiction in terms. In a much quoted passage he suggests that,

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if the state of affairs assumed by the theory of perfect competition ever existed, it would not only deprive of their scope all the activities which the verb ‘to compete’ describes but would make them virtually impossible. (p. 92)

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Instead competition is a succession of events, a dynamic process, a voyage of exploration into the unknown in which successively superior products and production methods are introduced, and consumers discover who meets their particular needs and how. Neither producers nor consumers know in advance the outcome of the competitive process, for that can only be established by trial and error. Putting it another way, atomistic competitive trading implies the absence of all competitive actions. Again we begin to see a link between the process view and the emphasis on differential behaviours of rival agents, and we should note Hayek’s insistence that differentiation of this kind undermines any claim that agents can have complete knowledge of all the factors relevant to market behaviour.

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Knight, too, favoured an exploratory perspective on the economic process in which not only the capabilities of firms but the preferences of individuals become the endogenous outcome of a trial and error economic process.

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When new opportunities continually arise, one will see under competition a continuing process of change which carries with it continued opportunities for profit and growth. One cannot hope to understand the competitive nature of such a process by examining it in terms of static competitive equilibrium.(1983, p. 39)

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The driving force in competition is not the adjustment of price but innovation, the theory of which had occupied Schumpeter in two previous major works, Business Cycles and The Theory of Economic Development. For it is through innovation that firms command a decisive cost or quality advantage affecting not their marginal profits but their very existence. Thus it is a matter of comparative indifference whether atomistic price competition in the ordinary sense operates more or less promptly.

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(Moi ici: Cada cavadela cada minhoca!!!!! O trecho que se segue é um manjar dos deuses. Uma achega à minha guerra sobre a superioridade da eficácia sobre a eficiência) Capitalism is not to be judged in terms of its immediate efficiency in allocating given resources across given opportunities but in terms of its ability over time to create resources and opportunities. Hence Schumpeter’s central idea of change driven from within, brilliantly captured in his phrase ‘creative destruction’. This, it should be emphasized, is not an optional extra to the capitalist process but is the capitalist process: equilibrium capitalism is for Schumpeter a contradiction in terms.

Consequently, it would seem one cannot understand capitalistic competition in terms of a comparison of sequences of equilibria."

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Mongo por todo o lado!!!
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Trechos retirados de "Evolutionary economics and creative destruction" de J. Stanley Metcalfe

A experiência pode ser uma desvantagem (parte II)

Continuado daqui.
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Via @Jabaldaia cheguei a um interessante texto sobre como a experiência, a proficiência, cobra uma taxa na nossa capacidade mental. Assim, quando o mundo muda... podemos ficar inabilitados a lidar com essa mesma mudança, por que a experiência cega-nos e aplicamos a receita do costume quando ela já está ultrapassada.
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"Expertise might also come with a dark side, as all those learned patterns make it harder for us to integrate wholly new knowledge.
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The problem with our cognitive chunks is that they’re fully formed – an inflexible pattern we impose on the world – which means they tend to be resistant to sudden changes, such as a street detour in central London. They also are a practiced habit, and so we tend to rely on them even when they might not be applicable.
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The larger lesson is that the brain is a deeply constrained thinking machine, full of cognitive tradeoffs and zero-sum constraints. Those chess professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of games and places they can’t easily understand."
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Trechos retirados de "The Cognitive Cost Of Expertise"

A experiência pode ser uma desvantagem

Depois de estarem, durante décadas, protegidas pelas taxas alfandegárias, com o fim da boleia das desvalorizações competitivas e com o fim da boleia dos salários baixos, tudo se conjugou para que as PMEs se tivessem concentrado instintivamente na competição pelo preço após a adesão à CEE (era a opção que rendia mais retorno no curto prazo, como o comprovava a entrada das multinacionais para arrancar com unidades produtivas gigantes a precisar de mão-de-obra barata).
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Quando Cavaco começou a fortalecer o escudo, primeiro, e com a entrada no pelotão da frente do euro, depois, esse modelo de sucesso para as PMEs começou a fraquejar e foi esmagado quando o Muro de Berlim caiu e a China e a Europa de Leste chegaram à mesa a pedir lugar no banquete do comércio mundial.
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Que experiência competitiva tinham as PMEs? O que é que na sua experiência as podia preparar para os novos tempos que se desenhavam?
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"In light of the theory of Red Queen competition, we should attend to whether or not an organization has developed through a history of having competed. To see this, we would have to broaden our perspective to allow for competitive hysteresis, the current-time effects of having experienced competition in the past. If we see that an organization has endured considerable competition over its history, then it is likely to have developed various capabilities aligned with the prevailing logic of competition. Consequently, such an organization can be expected to be more viable as a result of its history. Similarly, such an organization should be an especially strong rival due to its history of having competed. Thus the Red Queen process predicts competitive hysteresis, such that βj and wj vary as a function of the extent to which an organization has experienced competition historically.
Looking across a population of organizations, their shared history of competition may have generated different capabilities in the different organizations, each dealing with the logic of competition in its own way. Yet while the specific capabilities that develop may differ, some of their consequences will manifest as the hysteretic effects of competition.
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organizations that have been exposed to a history of competition will prove to be more viable"
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Cuidado com esta última afirmação. Serão tanto mais viáveis enquanto a lógica competitiva não se modificar. Se a lógica competitiva se modificar, essa experiência será uma espécie de "custos afundados", uma espécie de lastro que, quase certamente, impedirá ou dificultará a emergência de novas formas de organização, novas propostas de valor, em resposta às alterações do contexto competitivo.
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Trecho retirado de "THE RED QUEEN AMONG ORGANIZATIONS" de William Barnett.
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A não esquecer.

Diferentes tipos de competição

Cada vez mais aprecio o paralelismo entre a economia e a biologia, como escreveu Beinhocker, a economia é o resultado da evolução humana. Assim, da mesma forma que os morcegos desenvolveram o sonar e os leopardos a sua pele com pintas o paralelismo, os humanos desenvolveram a economia.

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Cito de seguida dois trechos retirados do artigo "The Red Queen and the Court Jester:Species Diversity and the Role of Biotic and Abiotic Factors Through Time" de Michael J. Benton e publicado no número de Fevereiro de 2009 da revista Science:

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"Evolution may be dominated by biotic factors, as in the Red Queen model, or abiotic factors, as in the Court Jester model, or a mixture of both. The two models appear to operate predominantly over different geographic and temporal scales: Competition, predation, and other biotic factors shape ecosystems locally and over short time spans, but extrinsic factors such as climate and oceanographic and tectonic events shape larger-scale patterns regionally and globally, and through thousands and millions of years."
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"There are two ways of viewing evolution, through the spectacles of either the Red Queen or the Court Jester. The Red Queen model (1) stems from Darwin, who viewed evolution as primarily a balance of biotic pressures, most notably competition, and it was characterized by the Red Queen’s statement to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
The Court Jester model (2) is that evolution, speciation, and extinction rarely happen except in response to unpredictable changes in the physical environment, recalling the capricious behavior of the licensed fool of Medieval times. Neither model was proposed as exclusive, and both Darwin and Van Valen (1) allowed for extrinsic influences on evolution in their primarily biotic, Red Queen views.
Species diversity in a Red Queen world depends primarily on intrinsic factors, such as body size, breadth of physiological tolerance, or adaptability to hard times. In a Court Jester world, species diversity depends on fluctuations in climate, landscape, and food supply. In reality, of course, both aspects might prevail in different ways and at different times, what could perhaps be called the multilevel mixed model. Traditionally, biologists have tended to think in a Red Queen, Darwinian, intrinsic, biotic factors way, and geologists in a Court Jester, extrinsic, physical factors way."

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Quando o cenário de competição sofre poucas mudanças, quando essas mudanças de contexto são lentas, a competição entre as empresas é sobretudo segundo o modelo Red Queen. Quando o cenário competitivo é fortemente alterado, por exemplo, com a adesão da China à OMC, ou com o fim do crédito fácil e barato entra em cena o modelo Court Jester.

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"Strategy and the Business Landscape" de Pankaj Ghemawat.

A minha solução não passa por aqui (V)

O jogo do Dilema do Prisioneiro em que os jogadores têm memória e realizam iterações infinitas, ou aleatórias, como descrito neste texto da wikipédia aqui é uma base para investigar as economias, as civilizações e as vantagens da cooperação e a tentação do egoísmo.
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"Para o Dilema do Prisioneiro Iterado, nem sempre é correcto dizer que uma certa estratégia é a melhor. Por exemplo, considere-se uma população onde todos desertam sempre, excepto um único individuo que continua a estratégia Tit for Tat (olho por olho - fazer aos outros o que nos fizeram na rodada anterior, começando por cooperar). Este individuo tem uma pequena desvantagem porque perde a primeira ronda.
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Numa população com um certa percentagem de indivíduos que desertam sempre e outros que continuam a estratégia Tit for Tat, a estratégia óptima para um indivíduo depende da percentagem, e da duração do jogo. Realizaram-se simulações de populações, onde morrem os indivíduos com pontuações baixas e se reproduzem aqueles com pontuações altas. A mistura de algoritmos na população final depende da mistura na população inicial."
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Beinhocker refere "We discovered that there is no one best strategy; rather, the evolutionary process creates an ecosystem of strategies - an ecosystem that changes over time in Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction."
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É a competição económica que assegura a cooperação entre os actores económicos. Se não há competição, o vendedor pode sacar mais retorno da relação com o comprador do que este está disposto a oferecer livremente.

Em busca de um monopólio.

Este artigo "The Comparative Advantage Theory of Competition" (de Shelby Hunt e Robert Morgan) impressionou-me.
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Impressiona-me hoje, em 2008, que em 1995 ainda alguém tivesse que perder tempo a enterrar a teoria neoclássica da competição perfeita.
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Impressionou-me "perfect competition is the only theory of competition that college students ever see"...
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Percebi o racional de algumas intervenções de Francisco Louçã: "abnormal profits" como "profits different from that of a firm in an industry characterized by perfect competition"
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Todo o trabalho que desenvolvo nas organizações tem um fito, procurar "abnormal profits".
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Como?
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Procurando dinamitar as situações de "perfect competition".
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Só se pode aspirar a rentabilidades superiores se se conseguir ser diferente dos outros. Ser diferente implica um afastamento da situação de competição perfeita.
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Quando uma organização adquire uma posição de vantagem comparativa sustentada, por exemplo, o bar de praia que melhor atende, melhor serve os clientes num raio de 10 km, de certa forma cria um monopólio, não está no mesmo campeonato dos que servem mal, dos que são mal educados, dos que têm falta de higiene, dos que têm falta de pessoal, dos que...
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É este tipo de monopólios que ajudo a criar.