Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta eficientismo. Mostrar todas as mensagens
Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta eficientismo. Mostrar todas as mensagens

quarta-feira, março 13, 2024

Modelos apodrecidos

Verdade seja dita que a afirmação do tweet não se encontra no texto do artigo "Boeing Response in Alaska Airlines 737 MAX Probe Is Blasted by Feds" no entanto, transpira uma cultura que impressiona:

"The airplane maker hadn't provided the names of 25 employees the NTSB believes may have information about work on a door plug that later flew off a plane during a Jan. 5 flight,

...

Boeing also hasn't provided investigators with documents about factory work related to the door plug's removal and reinstallation in mid-September, she said, adding that certain documents might not exist.

...

Homendy said Boeing has told the NTSB that it hasn't been able to find relevant documents in some cases. She said the safety board has been told Boeing has a process for removing, opening and reinstalling door plugs, but that the company hasn't yet provided the written procedures."

Mais informação em "Boeing discloses names of 737 MAX employees after NTSB chair faults cooperation" e em "US FAA hits Boeing 737 MAX production for quality control issues"

Entretanto o subcontratado Spirit AeroSystems tem muitas certificações.

Sintomas de apodrecimento de modelos que degeneram sob a pressão da doença anglo-saxónica em empresas too big to fail.

Já escrevi sobre a radioclubização, sobre o hollowing e o eficientismo.

sábado, novembro 04, 2023

Fluxo e reservatório

O FT de ontem trazia um artigo sobre a evolução dos chips de computador. Por coincidência, também ontem, durante a caminhada matinal vi este video no Youtube sobre o mesmo tema, "The end of Apple Silicon's reign".

O artigo do FT, intitulado "Chip wars set to change the landscape of personal computing":

"One sign that something is stirring has been the flurry of news around CPUsthe general-purpose processors that power PCs and servers. This week, as Apple unveiled its latest high-end Macs, its new M3 chips were very much the focus.

...

Last week, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm unveiled an Arm-based PC chip of its own. It is the first chip based on designs from Nuvia, a start-up founded by some of Apple's top chip engineers that Qualcomm acquired two years ago, and a sign that a real technology race is breaking out in PC chips.

...

Intel, which dominates the market for PC chips, is doing its best not to sound rattled by all of this. Given the high barriers to entry, it has good reason. 

...

All of this sets up a race in the normally staid world of personal computing, with Intel trying to pull off a rapid series of manufacturing upgrades over the next two years to get back in the lead, Apple digging in to protect the clear lead it has established with its Mac chips, and a new wave of Arm-based PCs hitting the market."

E comecei a pensar na impermanência das empresas grandes; as empresas grandes podem reinar por algum tempo, mas há sempre um momento em que falham. Empresas grandes, mais tarde ou mais cedo resvalam para o foco na eficiência, e isso dita a sua queda. E qualquer coisa neste pensamento fez-me pesquisar no blogue e encontrar, de Setembro de 2012, Contrarian, sempre!!!

E ao ler esse postal ... comecei a fazer ligações para o que tenho escrito aqui recentemente, ou tenho lido recentemente:

"Por isso, enquanto muitos continuam a acreditar na vantagem de ser grande, cada vez mais acredito nas vantagens de se ser pequeno, na paciência com a quota de mercado ou com o volume de vendas.

Ser pequeno pode significar: decidir rapidamente; agir ainda mais rapidamente;    experimentar em escala reduzida; estar mais próximo da tribo; corrigir o tiro inicial muito mais rapidamente; ter mais  paciência e não se amesquinhar por causa do próximo relatório de contas; ter mais paixão.

O que mais me entristece e ver empresas pequenas a pensarem como empresas grandes... uma empresa pequena nunca poderá competir de igual para igual com uma empresa grande. Uma empresa pequena devia concentrar-se em tornar-se uma grande empresa.

Uma empresa pequena pode ser uma grande empresa, assim como uma empresa grande pode nunca ser uma grande empresa.

Uma empresa pequena a caminho de ser uma grande empresa é a empresa que reconhece que o seu campeonato não é o da eficiência, mas o da arte, o da originalidade, o da rapidez, o da flexibilidade, o da proximidade, o da autenticidade, o da tradição, o da diferença... o caminho menos percorrido."

Quando era miúdo muito miúdo, ainda nem andava na escola primária, ouvi a minha mãe a comentar com alguém que "somos um fogo", ou seria "somos uma chama". E nunca me esqueci disso, não sei porquê.

Também as empresas são chamas, são transição, são fluxo até que passam a comportar-se como um reservatório, e em vez de aspirarem ao futuro e à novidade, focam-se na defesa do presente. E o futuro morre, mais depressa ou mais devagar, mas morre. E estas empresas não precisam de ser grandes, também podem ser pequenas. 

terça-feira, junho 20, 2023

A lente macro é tão ...

"When the world's business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, "is in a very sweet spot." Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.

...

A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance. But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong. [Moi ici: Mas quem é que achava que estava tudo bem?]

The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago - the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency look to be running off the rails. [Moi ici: Este blogue sempre achou errada a crença absoluta na maximização da eficiência, basta recordar os marcadores eficiência, eficientismo e denominador]

...

Globalization, seen in recent decades as unstoppable a force as gravity, is clearly evolving in unpredictable ways.  [Moi ici: Outra tema caro a este blogue, há mais de 17 anos que escrevemos aqui sobre as forças a minar a globalização. Recordo O regresso dos clientesEspeculação - um epílogo?] The move away from an integrated world economy is accelerating. And the best way to respond is a subject of fierce debate.

...

As the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization "were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic - and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine."[Moi ici: Nunca esqueço de Maio de 2020 - El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha]

...

Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity. [Moi ici: Recordo aquilo a que chamo a doença anglo-saxónica, recordo as críticas que fazemos há anos à automatização - Especulação sobre mais um falhanço da automatização, recordo o que escrevo sobre Kevin O'Leary]

...

The story of the international economy today, said Henry Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is about "how geopolitics is gobbling up hyperglobalization. [Moi ici: O que me impressiona nestas análises é que me parecem demasiado macro. Há mais de uma década que a globalização está a recuar por causa de Mongo, por causa do fim do modelo do século XX, por causa de "We are all weird"]

...

"Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous," Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to "oversimplified market efficiency," he added, proved to be a mistake." [Moi ici: O que me impressiona nestas análises é a crença de que a economia é como a física newtoniana, quando a economia é a continuação da biologia"]


Trechos retirados do artigo, "Failures of Globalization Shatter Long-Held Beliefs", publicado no NYT do passado Domingo. 

quinta-feira, junho 01, 2023

"Significance is inconvenient"

Volta e meia leio, ou presencio situações que me fazem recuar a 2015:


Cuidado com o eficientismo, essa doença anglo-saxónica.

Ontem, comecei a ler o último livro de Seth Godin, "The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams" onde sublinhei:
"to find the magic that happens when we are lucky enough to cocreate with people who care.
...
The choices have never been as clear as they are now:
Industrial capitalism (industrialism) seeks to use power to create profits.
Market capitalism seeks to solve problems to make a profit.
Industrial capitalism was built on the extraordinary productivity of the machine age. Feed the machine first, turn everything (including workers and customers) into machines, and scale up the enterprise. It evolved to incorporate the network effect and natural (or unnatural) monopolies to gain more power. It then used that power to capture the efforts of government to create even more power. [Moi ici: Cenas relacionadas com biombos e carpetes, aka cronyism - Cronyism e Two types of cronyism]
...
Market capitalism, meanwhile, continues to create most of the jobs and value worldwide. This is the never-ending work of finding problems and solving them. Market capitalists have no power over customers (or even, in most cases, their employees). Instead, they work to bring effort and insight to a rapidly changing marketplace in service of their customers.
The fork is right here, right now. Perhaps it's time to notice it and to choose a path.
...
the essence of productive consumer-focused industrialism. To create convenience.
To be fair, industrial capitalism works. It creates leverage and productivity then delivers expected results, all while lowering prices and increasing access to goods and services.
The modern world wouldn't exist without the progress that industry allowed, and for many, the safety these jobs offer is a lifeline and a useful way to live.
...
But late-stage industrial capitalism is different. It doesn't know where to stop. [Moi ici: Algo a que chamamos estratégias cancerosas] It not only captures those seeking safety, but also shackles those seeking significance.

...

But the stopwatch comes for all of us.

If we are going to compete with those who seek the perfection of industrial capitalism, we should know that they will out-measure, out standardize, and outmanage us. It's a race to the bottom.


The work of significance embraces the very things that industrialism seeks to stamp out.

Significance is inconvenient.

...

The answer begins simply with: we need to choose."

Esta manhã na capa do JdN leio, "Portugal é o quarto país na Europa com mais hotéis a caminho" ... um exemplo do que é uma estratégia cancerosa que não sabe quando parar, a isto chama-se a Tragédia dos Baldios!

sexta-feira, maio 26, 2023

Cuidado com o eficientismo

Há anos que escrevo sobre os que olham para a Economia como se olha para a ciência de Galileu ou de Newton. Em Economia o que é verdade hoje amanhã é mentira, e vice versa.

"By concentrating production in large facilities, companies can achieve economies of scale that lower the costs of production. [Moi ici: Racional típico do século XX em que que a competição pela eficiência e custo unitário era a única possibilidade de ser bem sucedido] Large-scale equipment can be operationally more efficient than smaller units.
...
To be sure, scale does not automatically translate to lower costs. In some industries, production might be undertaken on a small scale with little or no disadvantage, and it’s possible to attain economies of scale at medium-sized production units. At times, scale can even be a problem. [Moi ici: Em Mongo a variedade é mais importante que a eficiência]
...
As we’ve seen during the pandemic, overly centralized production can create fragile supply chains
...
Research has found that companies that are big but less centralized — for instance, ones that own facilities spread across the country or around the world — enjoy more limited advantages. This type of scale can yield benefits in the form of lower costs, as a distributed network can avoid the need to transport goods over long distances, and spreading out production across multiple facilities can mitigate the consequences of a disruption at a single plant. 
...
More recent research supports ... that aggregating many production units under common ownership does not yield significant operational efficiencies. And if local and regional markets are best served through a network of local and regional distribution and production facilities, what is the public benefit of a single national corporation consolidating its ownership in place of many local and regional firms? Scale tied to the aggregation of assets comes with organizational challenges that can cause significant inefficiencies. Top-level management may have a harder time directing a dispersed team of managers, necessitating the creation of additional layers of administration to ensure that the corporation and its disparate parts are run effectively. [Moi ici: Por isso há muito tempo que escrevo que a cultura portuguesa não lida bem com as exigências de gestão das organizações grandes] And this bureaucracy can add costs and be a source of inefficiency on its own."


domingo, março 26, 2023

"the real impacts happen when they act like small ones"

Há anos fixei um tweet de Tom Peters neste postal Too Big To Care que voltei a referir neste outro postal Too big to care.

Ontem, recordei-me dele ao ler Seth Godin em "Is it possible to care at scale?":

"Caring at scale can’t be done by the CEO or a VP. But what these folks can do is create a culture that cares. They can hire people who are predisposed to care. They can pay attention to the people who care and measure things that matter instead of chasing the short term.

Large organizations have significant structural advantages. But the real impacts happen when they act like small ones."


segunda-feira, abril 25, 2022

"investments to increase income"

“What people informally call making money refers to profit margins: income minus cost. Making money is thus a function of increasing income and/or reducing cost. Unfortunately, most efforts toward making money focus exclusively on increasing operational efficiency by cutting cost, thereby ignoring any opportunities to reallocate money for processes that use the money more effectively to generate additional income or to reduce cost. As a result, decision makers show surprisingly little interest in investments to increase income (grow bottom-line results), other than through merger and acquisition transactions.”
Trecho retirado de "The Root Cause: Rethink Your Approach to Solving Stubborn Enterprise-Wide Problems" de Hans Norden.

sábado, abril 16, 2022

"become that target audience’s “obvious choice” supplier"

Mais um desfile de temas habituais neste blogue: eficientismo, objectivos versus consequências, obliquidade, originação de valor, clientes-alvo, monopólios informais.
"There seems to be consensus that the purpose of a business is to make money. In other words, success is equated with money. Therefore, everything is given a price tag including people, humanity, health, safety, organizational culture, work climate, values, morality, ethics, pride of workmanship, and the environment.
Consequently, based on theories of operational efficiency, decisions are reduced to an analytic process of determining which solution is economic and which is uneconomic. The one that costs less wins.
...
No one denies the necessity for a commercial enterprise to pursue revenue and a healthy profit margin. The criticism against “making money” is that it should not be professed as the purpose of a business system.
Rather, earning a profit margin is not the purpose of a business but a “prerequisite” for operating a sustainable business. Please do not disregard this distinction between purpose and prerequisite as a matter of semantics, for it is nothing of the sort. Profits are the applause for a job well done, and receiving a standing ovation is the cry for an encore. It is a show of being in demand; it is the proof of a success!
...
The price people are willing to pay for a product or service is equal to the perceived use value they anticipate receiving from their purchase or investment. Because not everyone has the same perception of what constitutes use value, not everyone is a prospective buyer of your brand or your kind of product or service—hence the recognition of market segmentation and the identification of different target audiences.
Rather than creating use value similar to one’s competitors, different expressions of use value can be created by changing the business’s transformation process.
...
The profit margin is thus equal to the utility that a product or service delivers to its intended target audience. Therefore, the challenge of any business, with the exception of monopolies and oligopolies, is to add more utility to its value proposition targeting a specific audience than its immediate competitors. In other words, pursuing this strategy to become that target audience’s “obvious choice” supplier—and thus standing out as the only choice in the hearts and minds of your market segment."

Trecho retirado de "The Root Cause: Rethink Your Approach to Solving Stubborn Enterprise-Wide Problems" de Hans Norden

segunda-feira, abril 11, 2022

Uma surpresa boa!

A leitura de "The Root Cause: Rethink Your Approach to Solving Stubborn Enterprise-Wide Problems" de Hans Norden está a ser uma surpresa, por vezes brutal. Toda uma série de hibridações que desenvolvi ao longo dos anos a aparecerem-me, página após página em lingua inglesa.

Já vi muita gente a usar o modelo de cadeia de valor de Porter de muita maneira, mas não assim:

“The value chain is a representation of the process by which input variables are transformed into output variables. Therefore, the value chain’s design, organization or structure, implementation or operation, maintenance, and management are a function of its competitive advantage.

Within the value chain, each business function has its own objective that contributes to and supports the realization of the overall purpose of the value chain.”
O modelo de Porter usado como uso os mapas de processos!

Olhar para as organizações como seres vivos, organismos e não mecanismos:
“Note the difference in perception of a business, and therefore its value chain, as an organism or as a mechanism. The specifications and design of individual component parts that constitute a value chain are less important than their intricately interdependent and synergistic relationships, which determine a business’s character and nature as an organic whole.”

A linguagem que aprendi com Goldratt e Dettmer 

“It makes sense to distinguish between the desired state and the current state when they are misaligned—when the value chain experiences change. The root cause can originate from outperforming the aim or by easing up on the aim, or by changing the benchmark for success.”

A doença do eficientismo, a doença de saltar para soluções sem perceber as causas: 

Beware of managers with a finance background who are prone to perceive this altered state as a financial problem in need of a financial solution, which usually means increasing operational efficiency. The unfortunate effect of treating symptoms is ignorance about the magnitude of the problem, jumping to conclusions that might even aggravate the problem, and allowing the problem to linger and fester. As a result, problems will persist, recur, or become a latent condition that can wreak havoc when least expected and tend to arrive at a critical moment in the business’s future.”

quinta-feira, março 24, 2022

"what we are looking for are neither heroes, nor processes"


"What About Processes?

The key to all of this debate for the present day is the inability of some innovating organizations to ever get sufficiently close to their customers to really know what they want. That’s when heroes are needed, especially in organizations that are seen as being inflexible, often when involved in the production of high-volume, standardized offerings, or what Eric von Hipple refers to as “manufacturer-dominated” firms. This takes us directly back to Steve Blank’s observation that organizations whose processes are not designed for non-standard work, require individuals to move these organizations into market responses that they would otherwise not consider. Innovation heroics are, indeed, a symptom of a lack of preparedness for surprise, and as surprise becomes more frequent, as the unfamiliar becomes more present, and as time to market continues to shorten, something needs to be added to organizational culture to reduce a reliance upon what would otherwise require an inexhaustible supply of candidate heroes. Let’s be clear, however, that what we are looking for are neither heroes, nor processes; heroes are an admission of process failure, and most processes are not sufficiently flexible for whatever the future is likely to bring.

...

What is needed is a shared understanding of principles that authorize a natural way for the organization to allow unscheduled innovation to happen, and a trust in the employees to make the right choices. This is not heroic, and processes are not involved, either. Instead, it is a combination of beliefs, understanding and staff buy-ins so that the organization is prepared to take surprises in stride."

Trechos retirados de "A New Look For Innovation: Less Heroes, Fewer Processes

quarta-feira, março 09, 2022

País de funcionários, de kits, de monumentos à treta, de diletantismo

"“Para termos dinamismo demográfico, eventualmente teremos de ter mais imigração. Mas é preciso também mais eficiência”, disse o ex-ministro Augusto Mateus, um dos oradores do certame, levantando a questão da fraca produtividade em Portugal. O nosso país é um dos que apresenta menores níveis de produtividade real por hora trabalhada, integrando os seis Estados-membros com menor capacidade de gerar riqueza, situando-se em cerca de 65% da média europeia. “Precisamos de trabalhar melhor”, resumiu Augusto Mateus.

O escritor e cronista Henrique Raposo, outro dos convidados do debate, insiste na questão da produtividade: “Não conheço nenhum país em que seja tão difícil articular o trabalho com a família. Na Alemanha começava a trabalhar às 8 da manhã e saía às 4. Mas acabava sempre por sair mais tarde, até que me disseram: ‘Tens de sair às 4, para tratares da tua vida. Se não trabalhaste como deve ser até às 4 é porque não foste produtivo.’”"

Aumentar a produtividade à custa da eficiência?


Come on ... ainda não saímos do modelo mental dos engenheiros?

Eheheheh pedir a opinião a Henrique Raposo sobre produtividade.

Lamento que Augusto Mateus use uma linguagem que induza em erro. O foco não deve ser o aumento da eficiência, mas sim o aumento da eficácia. O foco não deve ser trabalhar melhor para produzir o que já se faz, mas trabalhar para produzir coisas diferentes.

O aumento da produtividade que precisamos só pode ser obtido à custa de produzir coisas diferentes que podem ser vendidas com preços unitários bem superiores. Basta olhar para o exemplo do Japão, Taiwan ou de Hong Kong e o flying geese (The "flying geese" model, ou deixem as empresas morrer!!!:

BTW, alguém mediu o impacte dos kits produtividade

Um país de planos e de relatórios, em que o objectivo é cumprir o plano, indepedentemente de conseguir algum resultado. Aliás, nem há desafios, metas, resultados a atingir: só monumentos à treta!

Pôr o pescoço no cepo não faz parte da matriz mental portuguesa, país de funcionários.

Trechos retirados de "Abrir as portas aos imigrantes pode ser uma solução para Portugal"

sexta-feira, março 04, 2022

"an obsession with creating value and outcomes for customers and users"

Parece retirado deste blogue: 

"The new management innovation is very different. Instead of an industrial-era focus on internal efficiency and outputs, the primary preoccupation in the new age is external: an obsession with creating value and outcomes for customers and users. Instead of starting from what the firm can produce that might be sold to customers, digital firms work backwards from what customers need and then figure out how that might be delivered in a sustainable way. Instead of limiting themselves to what the firm itself can provide, the firm often mobilizes other firms to help meet user needs."

Trechos retirados de "Why Management Innovation Is Hiding In Plain Sight

sexta-feira, janeiro 14, 2022

"customer service is getting worse"

"Yes, customer service is getting worse. Companies treat customer service as a cost and as Zeynep Ton has explained over and over, the outcome is predictable.

...

In fact, there is industry-speak for this it's called 'containment." It represents "the percentage of users who engage with an automated system and end their interaction without transferring to a voice or live chat agent. The goal is to prevent you from ever contacting a person, and companies have gotten very smart about this.

...

All of this gets at a growing  problem that I don’t think corporate types factor into their customer service equation.  It’s easy to figure out that a typical service encounter costs $5.  What is a lot harder to measure is the upside of providing excellent service (not to mention the upside of not turning up in slightly snarky articles penned by business school professors)."

Em linha com o meu aviso em Every visit customers have to make ...


Trechos retirados de "The better your automated customer service options, the worse your customer service experience

domingo, dezembro 05, 2021

Uma transição por fazer ...

"The new management innovation are very different. Instead of an industrial-era focus on internal efficiency and outputs, the primary preoccupation in the new age is external: an obsession with creating value and outcomes for customers and users. Instead of starting from what the firm can produce that might be sold to customers, digital firms work backwards from what customers need and then figure out how that might be delivered in a sustainable way. Instead of limiting themselves to what the firm itself can provide, the firm often mobilizes other firms to help meet user needs."

Quem acompanha este blog desde 2004 pode facilmente recordar o quanto estes temas fazem parte da narrativa desde o início.

O que escrevo acerca do eficientismo, da lição de Marn e Rosiello (o burro era eu), do Evangelho do Valor. O que escrevo acerca de começar pelo fim e isso é olhar para a menina do olho dos clientes-alvo e, a partir do que procuram e valorizam, andar para trás e preparar a organização para entrega sistemática desses inputs (recordar input, não output). E o que escrevo sobre os ecossistemas da procura depois da experiência de 2004 em que o tema emergiu naturalmente de um desafio profissional em mãos, antes de começar a ler sobre o tema.

Quantas empresas ainda precisam de fazer esta transição...

Trecho retirado de "Why Management Innovation Is Hiding In Plain Sight

sexta-feira, junho 18, 2021

"it’s a chance to make a difference"

Um bom texto, mais um de Seth Godin:

"Interactions with the people who are enrolled and giving you the benefit of the doubt are a form of avocado time. They shouldn’t be optimized for efficiency or even leverage. Instead, it’s a chance to make a difference."

Como não relacionar com Stephen Covey e não só em "Every visit customers have to make ..."

terça-feira, fevereiro 09, 2021

Every visit customers have to make ...

Sim, segunda metade dos anos 90, aprendi esta lição com este senhor. Influenciou postais como:

E fez-me criticar esta nota desde a primeira vez que a vi:

"Quem não aposta no "cheaper" e no "cost", aposta na interacção, aposta na co-criação, aposta noutro mindset... eu diria, "Every visit customers have to make are an opportunity for interaction and co-creation"

Nunca esquecer, Golias pode apostar e ganhar com a automação porque está no seu ADN; contudo, David não tem qualquer vantagem em seguir esse caminho, tem muito mais a perder do que os euros que poupa."

sexta-feira, novembro 20, 2020

"We become what we do"

Comecei a ouvir o último livro de Seth Godin durante as viagens de carro para fora de Gaia. Seth Godin é um autor que escreve para os humanos de Mongo, os humanos que fogem do século XX e abraçam a arte em todas as suas facetas.

BTW, recordar o que escrevemos aqui ao longo dos anos sobre a arte e o eficientismo. Por isso, apelar à arte fere o mindset assente no século XX.

"For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we’d like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn’t well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it’s going to work.

It’s about throwing, not catching. Starting, not finishing. Improving, not being perfect.

No one learns to ride a bike from a manual.

...

Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.

No change, no art.

...

It’s a form of leadership, not management. A process without regard for today’s outcome, a commitment to the journey.

You were born ready to make art. But you’ve been brainwashed into believing that you can’t trust yourself enough to do so.

You’ve been told you don’t have enough talent (but that’s okay, because you can learn the skill instead).

You’ve been told you’re not entitled to speak up (but now you can see how many others have taken their turns).

And you’ve been told that if you can’t win, you shouldn’t even try (but now you see that the journey is the entire point).

Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.

...

“If we believe that it’s not our turn, that we’re not talented enough, we’ll do whatever we can to make that story true. We’ll sit back and wait to be chosen instead. [Moi ici: Algo que li recentemente como sendo o efeito Forer]

That’s backward.

Most of the time, the story we live by came from somewhere. It might be the way we were raised, or it could be the outcome of a series of events. Burn yourself on the stove and you might persuade yourself that you should go nowhere near a stove. Grow up in a home with low expectations and it’s possible you’ll begin to believe them. The story we tell ourselves leads to the actions we take.

If you want to change your story, change your actions first. When we choose to act a certain way, our mind can’t help but rework our narrative to make those actions become coherent.

We become what we do.”

Trechos retirados de "The Practice" de Seth Godin.

“Or consider the Forer effect. This is the strong tendency that subjects show to believe feedback from personality tests, regardless of whether those results are bogus.”

Trecho retirado de "Uncharted" de Margaret Heffernan. 

domingo, agosto 23, 2020

Acreditam mesmo?


O artigo que me alertou para a saída do novo livro de Roger Martin, "Overcoming America’s Obsession With Economic Efficiency":
"It explains why the pursuit of efficiency stems from the notion of firms as complicated machines and attempting to maximize their efficiency, rather than as complex adaptive systems, within markets which themselves are also complex adaptive systems."
Um tema clássico deste blogue e da minha guerra profissional.

No início do livro pode ler-se:
"Professor Wassily Leontief and I almost overlapped at Harvard University. Leontief, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics,
...
To Leontief, the US economy was a very big, complicated machine, fundamentally not unlike a car. A car has many subsystems—power train, steering, cooling/heating/ventilation, entertainment, safety, and so forth—each of which can be understood independently and then pieced together to produce the desired vehicle with the desired characteristics. Across the operation of that vehicle, the input-output equations are clear. When you push the gas pedal, the car speeds up. When you slam on the brakes, the car comes to a halt. As with a car, the inputs and outputs of the various subsystems of the economy could be mapped out and understood. Because he saw the economy as an understandable and analyzable machine, Leontief was a fan of planning, and during the economically challenged 1970s he argued that national planning might be the only hope for US economic policy.[Moi ici: Enquanto lia estas linhas ao longo da marginal marítima de Gaia, no silêncio das 6h30 da manhã, visualizei um ex-governador do Banco de Portugal, Vítor Constâncio, a falar sobre as vantagens e virtudes do "socialismo científico". Recordei as minhas guerras contra os que vêem a economia como se fosse física newtoniana"]
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While I was taking my undergraduate economics courses, I was naive as to the power of models to shape actions and the power of metaphors to drive the adoption of models. I believed that the models I was being taught were descriptions of how the economy actually works. It took me a while to figure out that those models are no more than a theory of how the economy might work, if the economy were, in fact, like a car. And it is because we are all so convinced that the US economy is like a car that we stick with models like Leontief’s even when those models no longer generate accurate predictions concerning the economic outcomes that will follow our interventions.

Though not cognizant of it at the time, I was exclusively taught “neoclassical Keynesian economics."
Como é que dizia Napoleão? Agora pensemos nos governos que se sucedem e nas fórmulas que os orientam. Pensem nos milhares de milhões que vão ser despejados na economia para, supostamente criar uma nova economia... sei que muitos pensam em aceder à gamela, mas os outros? Acreditam mesmo que uma economia se rege top-down de forma virtuosa?

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better”

domingo, julho 26, 2020

Cooperativas, eficientismo e Mongo

Há anos que aqui no blogue escrevo sobre as cooperativas associadas a Mongo e sobre a loucura do eficientismo.

A ideia das cooperativas surgiu-me na sequência da democratização da produção e da fuga à proletarização "uberiana". Alguns postais ao longo dos anos sobre o tema foram:
Mongo é um tema recorrente aqui no blogue.

Ontem em "From the Gig Economy to the Guild Economy" encontrei os mesmos três temas relacionados:
"there’s a problem – actually, many problems. Efficiency is a diminishing returns proposition. The more efficient we become, the longer and harder we need to work to get the next increment of efficiency. Diminishing returns is a problem on its own, but it’s compounded by the fact that we live in a Big Shift world of mounting performance pressure – competition is intensifying, change is accelerating, and extreme disruptive events occur with increasing frequency.
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We’re already starting to see some of that start to happen in the gig economy. Individual workers are discovering that there are others who share their passion and coming together so that they can work on projects as a group, rather than individuals.
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On the other side, institutions are going to begin to see that the real value of contract workers is the diversity of experience and expertise that they bring to the work. These contract workers can help the institution’s employees to learn faster by exposing them to different perspectives and approaches to addressing work. These institutions will begin to expand their focus beyond just cost savings and see gig workers as an opportunity to learn faster.
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We’re going to begin to see impact groups forming and coming together into broader networks that will help them to learn even faster.
That’s where guilds come in.
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As independent workers become more aware of the imperative for accelerating learning, they will tend to affiliate into guilds that will help to connect them with others who might become part of their impact group and, more broadly, with other impact groups that share their passion for increasing impact in a particular set of activities. These guilds can help to knit together larger and larger networks of impact groups, generating something that I call “creation spaces,” to help scale and accelerate learning."
Acerca de Mongo, no mesmo artigo, algo que parece retirado aqui do blogue acerca da profusão de tribos e do bailado entre oferta e procura:
"Beyond the gig economy, there’s another area that will see the re-emergence of guilds. That’s in product and service businesses that will increasingly fragment as customers demand more and more tailored products and services to serve their specific needs. The participants in these small, but very profitable, product and service businesses will see value in connecting with others in their particular domains so that they can all learn faster and create even more value with less resource. For example, think of a guild for craft chocolate companies that are serving very specific customer niches.
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To address the opportunity to help participants to learn faster, these guilds need to find a way to move beyond fear of competition and foster the excitement that can come from addressing the exponentially expanding opportunities created by the Big Shift. Rather than embracing a scarcity mindset, these guilds need to cultivate an abundance mindset. They need to recognize that, the more people that come together, driven by a commitment to learn faster, the more opportunity there will be for value creation. It’s a very different heartset and mindset from the ones generated by the fear that is engulfing more and more of the world’s population.
The bottom line
The imperative to learn faster is going to motivate individuals to come together in very different ways. In at least one dimension, our future may represent a return to the past, when we see the re-emergence of guilds. Rather than isolated individuals driven by fear as they confront mounting performance pressures, we are likely to see people coming together, excited about the opportunity to learn faster and embrace exponentially expanding opportunity."

quarta-feira, junho 17, 2020

"we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness"

"Most efforts at becoming customer-centric are well intentioned. Most people charged with implementing such initiatives are doing the best they can. The underlying reasons that most companies aren’t close to being customer-centric are varied. 
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Yet all too often the reason comes down to this: we are only pretending to care. Because if we really cared, we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness.
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Many problems rest in basic survey design and structure. We may be measuring our performance against what we have predetermined are important purchasing variables that may have once been valid but no longer are. We may be talking only to current customers, when more relevant insights could come from listening to lapsed customers and/or prospects.
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once we understand that people buy the story before they buy the product, we have to expand our view of what goes into a purchase decision. It’s rarely all about the product or customers simply trading off price against functional features and benefits.
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The second challenge of historical approaches is limiting our view of the people (individually and collectively) who need to be considered and enrolled in our efforts to drive remarkable results. Clearly a laser focus on our target consumers is critically important. Yet the journey to remarkable requires a broader system of people (those who work for us, with us, are connected to us), processes, practices, technology, and so on that must be engaged to drive the outcomes we desire."
Aquele "we wouldn’t consistently choose efficiency over effectiveness" fez-me logo recordar disto:


Trechos retirados do capítulo 13 "Essential #2: Human-Centered" de Remarkable Retail.