E se o COVID- 19 matasse o que resta do século XX?

Quando escrevo sobre o século XX penso:

• no século da produção em massa;
• no século do eficientismo;
• no século da competição baseada na escala;
• no século da competição baseada na redução dos custos unitários;
• no século da uniformização e da padronização.

"Decades of consolidation have made food systems more vulnerable, say experts. Beginning in the 1980s, the federal government allowed more agribusinesses to merge and grow largely without restraint in the name of efficiency—before, antitrust and other policies helped keep these industries decentralized and competitive. Consequently, a small number of giant, often vertically integrated, firms, produce and distribute the bulk of food in the U.S.
...
Dairy Farmers of America, for example, now controls 30 percent of all raw milk in the United States.
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In the meat industry, roughly 50 factories process 98 percent of the nation’s beef. The same holds for pork: Following industry consolidation in the late 1980s and 1990s, the portion of U.S. hogs slaughtered in massive, million-head capacity plants rose from 38 percent to 88 percent in just two decades.
...
Larger plants also concentrate more workers in close quarters, causing some of the largest clusters of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers in the country. At least 15 massive meat-processing plants shut down this month, reducing production capacity by 20 percent for both pork and beef. Experts now predict meat consumer shortages within a month and farmers are euthanizing livestock to deal with a sudden backlog of animals.
.
“If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

Como não recordar o esquema de 2008:

Mais eficiência é mais pureza estratégica.
Mais pureza estratégica é mais risco e menos flexibilidade.
Menos flexibilidade é mais mortalidade quando o mundo muda.

"the smallest and most local food providers, such as local farms providing community supported agriculture (CSA) shares, have reacted quickly to the crisis and benefited from a spike in demand for direct food sales. These businesses are not tied to complicated purchasing contracts and often work with multiple buyers and distribution channels, including direct access to consumers.
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“If you look at what the small farmers are doing, they’re changing on a dime to online ordering systems and delivery,” said Hendrickson. “Those organizations that have the most flexibility and latitude to change are going to be really important in the future.”
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Finally, public food infrastructure could play a critical role in supporting mid-sized producers, responding to shocks, and serving communities cut out of consolidated supply chains."

E se o COVID- 19 matasse o que resta do século XX? E se o COVID- 19 acelerasse a chegada de Mongo?

Afinal, não tenho repetido por aqui esta frase?

"El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha...”

Trechos retirados de "Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?"

Doença, bail out e a solução micro.

Em "Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia" voltei a referir o perigo do eficientismo, a doença anglo-saxónica, e a sabedoria nabateia.

Agora, encontro outra manifestação dessa doença:

"Unexpected crises should force us to rethink our premises. As I was reflecting on the economic consequences of Covid-19, a thought struck me: What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?...
Almonds once were grown in many places. But because some locations were better than others, and economies of scale were considerable, consolidation occurred. As the process continued, California’s Central Valley won out, and today more than 80% of the world’s almonds are produced there.
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Although this is the most efficient distribution of production, Mr. Martin says, it has a major drawback: “The almond industry designed away its redundancies, or slack, and in the process it lost the insurance that redundancy provides. One extreme local weather event or one pernicious virus could wipe out most of the world’s production.” As efficiency increased, resilience declined."[Moi ici: Outro tópico do artigo lá de cima, o gráfico que desenhei em 2008]

 Mais eficiência, menos flexibilidade, mais risco, mais mortalidade se o mundo mudar.

"This trade-off is unavoidable. Efficiency comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, while resilience requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment. As Mr. Martin puts it, “Resilient systems are typically characterized by the very features—diversity and redundancy, or slack—that efficiency seeks to destroy.”"

Por que é que a sociedade depois tem de fazer o "bail out" destes gigantes com pés de barro?

BTW, como é que um produtor de amêndoas independente pode ter sucesso num mundo de gigantes que competem pelo preço?

• O negócio deles é produto, a solução é vender autenticidade, tradição, marca, adjectivos.
• O negócio deles é massa homogénea e mediana, a solução é nicho.
• O negócio deles é ver o dono da prateleira como o cliente, a solução é comunicar com o consumidor que manda no dono da prateleira.
• O negócio deles é commodity, a solução é trabalhar para a experiência, para o outcome. 

Eficiência versus adaptabilidade

O meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras mandou-me este artigo, "6 Critical Lessons in Organisational Agility from the COVID-19 crisis". A introdução está em sintonia com as mensagens do blogue:

"Most businesses are designed for efficiency, not adaptability. [Moi ici: Recordar os marcadores do eficientismo, da eficiência, do numerador versus denominador] The underlying philosophy is to obtain the maximum yield for an acceptable effort and to scale this as effectively as possible. Last century’s Scientific Management is the key influence.  [Moi ici: Recordar o marcador sobre magnitograd, recordar Levitown, recordar o século XX]  Such businesses, by design, are not built to suddenly change course. They are designed to do key activities efficiently."

Há tempos aqui no blogue citei:

"for at least the next couple months every organisation in the world is a startup" 

E:

"El coronavirus actúa como acelerador de cambios que ya estaban en marcha..." 

Nos próximos tempos ainda faz mais sentido pensar em adaptabilidade:

"In contrast, a start-up is designed to be incredibly adaptable. It’s structure is fluid as it continually pivots to find the right product-market fit in order to survive. It is fast and nimble and can easy out-manoeuvre larger organisations, but it isn’t efficient and it can’t scale.

...
In a traditional firm (the freighter), intelligence and decision making is centralised. Decisions are made at the “top” of the firm and supporting directives cascade to the people doing the tasks. When decisions need to be made, they must flow back up to the centralised control and then back down again. The delay directly prevents agility.
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In an adaptive firm, authority is pushed to the people with the information. In other words, the people at the coalface are empowered to make appropriate decisions as required. If the decision requires others, they find the people required and attempt to make the decision as quickly as possible." 

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia

Quem conhece este blogue já sabe que há muitos anos escrevo sobre o eficientismo, escrevo sobre o denominador, escrevo sobre aquilo a que chamo a doença ango-saxónica.

Sobre a doença anglo-saxónica recordo, por exemplo:

• "Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica" (Agosto de 2019)
• "A doença anglo-saxónica" (Julho de 2019)
• "o choque com a teimosia anglo-saxónica de continuar a acreditar no século XX: eficiência, volume, escala, custo." (Junho de 2017)
• "Esta ideia da concorrência perfeita tornou-se no modelo mental da gestão anglo-saxónica que permeia e molda o pensamento dos autores da narrativa oficial, aqui e no resto do mundo." (Fevereiro de 2014)

O paradigma desta doença é Kevin O'Leary.

Sobre o eficientismo recordo, por exemplo:

• Fragilidade, flexibilidade, futuro e eficiência (Novembro de 2019)
• Contra o Evangelho do Eficientismo (Março de 2016)

Não posso listar um décimo dos postais que escrevi sobre estes temas, apenas recordo mais um. O título que se segue lista o vocabulário clássico usado neste blogue acerca do tema: "profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta" (Fevereiro de 2019)

O contrário da doença anglo-saxónica é seguir a via de Mongo. Em "Acerca do eficientismo", um postal de Dezembro de 2018, relaciono tudo isto, voltando a um postal de Dezembro de 2011, "Estranhistão ... weirdistão" e a outro de Agosto de 2011 sobre a sabedoria nabateia.

Por que recordo tudo isto?

Ontem à noite, já deitado, dei uma última vista de olhos pela minha timeline do Twitter e encontrei:

My new @washingtonpost editorial. The virus shows that making our companies efficient also made our country weak https://t.co/OKvzqd96sR More to come in my Sep 2020 book: When More is not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

— Roger L. Martin (@RogerLMartin) March 27, 2020

Alguns sublinhados do artigo:

"Efficiency is an unforgiving master. It crushes everything not in service of an immediate bottom line. But if there is a single economic policy lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that the United States’ obsession with efficiency over the past half-century has brutally undermined its capacity to deal with such a catastrophic event.
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Efficiency requires us to force out duplication and redundancy, increase specialization and more seamlessly connect things together. Resilience, on the other hand, enables us to adapt to changes in our environment. Efficiency and resilience are opposing forces in our economy, and the pandemic has shown us the high price we are paying for the modern focus on efficiency at the expense of resilience"

Como não recuar ao meu mágico Verão de 2008, mágico porque aprendi tanta coisa que influenciou o meu trabalho até hoje:

Quanto mais pura é uma estratégia, maior rentabilidade se pode obter, mas também maior o risco, e menor a flexibilidade, e maior a taxa de mortalidade se o mundo mudar rapidamente. Daí a importância de uma floresta de estratégias diversificadas a que chamo Mongo, um mundo de inúmeros picos na paisagem competitiva enrugada:

Daí o meu fascínio por um artigo de 2007 que citei pela primerira vez aqui em "O Grande Planeador, o Grande Geómetra, já era!":

"Life is the most resilient thing on the planet. It has survived meteor showers, seismic upheavals, and radical climate shifts. And yet it does not plan, it does not forecast, and, except when manifested in human beings, it possesses no foresight. So what is the essential thing that life teaches us about resilience?
Just this: Variety matters. Genetic variety, within and across species, is nature's insurance policy against the unexpected. A high degree of biological diversity ensures that no matter what particular future unfolds, there will be at least some organisms that are well-suited to the new circumstances."

Cuidado com os arautos de um novo socialismo, cuidado com os defensores de um governo mundial: o CyberSyn só nos trará a venezuelização como destino final.

Voltando ao artigo de Roger Martin:

"Third, by spreading so quickly, this pandemic has already illustrated the downside of our seamlessness in travel and trade. Early on in this pandemic, complete travel bans were seen as overly disruptive and draconian. For the future, we need to accept that the timely imposition of travel restrictions, within and across countries, is a powerful and necessary weapon, and adjust our travel expectations accordingly.
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All these measures would introduce productive friction into a system that has been developed over 50 years to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. As this pandemic has shown us, we need to value other qualities such as redundancy and buffers, if we are to tackle the next catastrophic event."

Daqui ressalta a importância da proximidade, outro tema desenvolvido ao longo dos anos aqui no blogue. Daqui ressalta a importância que a União Europeia como espaço económico comum representa para este pais socialista, pobre (sim, eu sei é uma redundância), envelhecido e dominado por instituições extractivas.

Basta olhar para esta tabela, retirada do dossiê sobre Portugal no World Footwear Yearbook Snapshot 2017

Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos exportado de Portugal? 26,09 USD
Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos importado para Portugal? 11,69 USD

Mais uma vez, cuidado com os "bicicletas" deste mundo, autênticos Sarumans nas suas torres de marfim, sem noção do que é a realidade da vida micro-económica, mas sempre dispostos a agir como governantes iluminados que sabem melhor do que nós próprios o que é melhor para nós. Convido à leitura desta série de quatro postais de Outubro de 2015 que ilustram factualmente a ignorância dessa gente.

Como diz o grande Nassim Taleb: Intelectuals Yet Idiots.

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia se não lhes derem o dinheiro para continuar o deboche que nos tem trazido até aqui, um país político que gasta tanto tempo e energia a discutir como distribuir a riqueza e não se preocupa em como facilitar a sua criação .

"How to Break Out of the Efficiency Trap"

"The nature of work is evolving in two complementary directions. In one direction, managers are redesigning jobs to take advantage of new opportunities to automate workflow processes. Their aim: transform how workers execute tasks in order to boost efficiencies and reduce costs. At the same time, some managers are redefining work to take advantage of new capacity freed up by job redesign. With work redefinition, work is no longer simply about task execution; it’s about creating new sources of value for customers and the business.
...
The less familiar but more expansive approach is to redefine what work is all about: It shifts the primary objective of work from efficiency to broader value creation. When work is appropriately redefined, workers focus on identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities instead of executing tasks.
...
Without an overriding strategy of redefining work, workers represent cost savings rather than freed capacity to create new value for the business or the customer.
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Companies won’t be able to significantly improve value creation if they redesign jobs to optimize processes with the goal of reducing costs.[Moi ici: Recordar a 3M e o 6-sigma]
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The workforce challenge for most companies is to make the transition from fixed work outcomes that deliver limited value to dynamic work outcomes with higher levels of potential value. A major part of this shift is to recognize that virtually all workers at every level of the organization, aided by machines, have the ability to anticipate what customers really want or need and to develop new approaches to meet those needs.
...
How to Break Out of the Efficiency Trap.
Many companies engaged in redesigning jobs today are caught in a kind of efficiency trap that prevents managers from realizing, or even pursuing, the potential of redefining work. To understand the scale and scope of this issue, executives need to embrace the fact that they are in the midst of a shift from scalable efficiency, where value creation in steady-state business environments focuses on optimization and predictability, to a future state of scalable learning, where conditions and requirements change rapidly and value creation focuses on learning and adaptation.
...
Many companies continue to see their workforce as resources to be managed, controlled, and mechanized. (We have spent the past 100-plus years exploiting models of Frederick Taylor’s ideas of scientific management.)
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To overcome the obstacles — of short-term cost optimization, Taylorism, and a single-minded focus on automation — leaders must first develop a compelling longer-term vision of the opportunity.
...
1.Zoom out to develop a sense of what the unmet needs of the marketplace might be, what types of impact might be most valuable, and what the most meaningful metrics will be.
...
2.Redesign jobs to free up capacity for redefined work. Use automation or other technologies and workforce alternatives to perform rote work that prevents the workforce from spending more time on better understanding and addressing customer needs."

Trechos retirados de "Redefining Work for New Value: The Next Opportunity"

Trabalhar uma marca a sério.

Artesãos versus industrialistas.
Artesãos versus carcaças ocas.
Artesãos versus aristocratas arruinados.

"The danger — expressed most simply — is living by the quarter. If there’s one thing that leaps out from the work done by eatbigfish around challenger brands, it’s that these businesses knew building a brand takes time.
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Unfortunately, short-termism is the business climate of our time. We live in the short-term. The danger is that because so few in the c-suites of major businesses these days have marketing experience they don’t understand that imposing short-term disciplines on marketing kills brands.
...
if you pursue efficiency solely you walk away from effectiveness, and we know this very well now. The most efficient way to use marketing and advertising is to achieve mediocre results at minute cost. That way you get immense returns on investments, but unfortunately you’ll do nothing in the long-term.
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Long-term growth is reaching, not for low-hanging fruit, but the fruit at the top of the tree. It’s about bringing tomorrow’s consumers into your brand. If all you’re doing is going for the low-hanging fruit at the bottom of the funnel, you can kiss goodbye to that really profitable long-term growth."

Trechos retirados de "‘Challenger thinking is how brands drive growth’: Peter Field on 20 years of challenger brands"

Fragilidade, flexibilidade, futuro e eficiência

Há anos que escrevo aqui no blogue sobre:

• O Evangelho do Valor;
• O eficientismo e o denominador;
• A eficácia e o numerador.

É uma linguagem que não costumo encontrar. O mainstream continua mergulhado no paradigma do século XX.

Pois bem, mão amiga mandou-me um recorte do livro "Sur/petition: The New Business Formula to Help You Stay Ahead of the Competition" de Edward de Bono:

"Efficiency is the ratio between input and output. It asks, what is the best output that I can get for the resources that I put in? For this required output, what is the minimum of resources that I must put in? If we think in terms of efficiency, we have to think in terms of input/output ratios.
Efficiency means productivity. Efficiency means no waste. Efficiency means getting the best out of our efforts, energy and resources. What can possibly be wrong about that?
To begin with, efficiency looks at input and output and does not look at the customer.
...
There are further problems with the concept of efficiency. Efficiency is measurable at one point in time. While efficiency has to be measurable, what may happen in the future cannot be measured. So it is left out of any efficiency equation. You design a suspension system for the bumps it encounters right now, not for all the possible bumps it might encounter in the future. Efficiency has always got to look backward and historically. It seeks to maximize what is now being done and what is now known.
When the future turns out not to be exactly as predicted, which is usually the case, efficiency may actually have gotten us into trouble. Very efficient businesses are often very brittle. There is no cushion and no give, because there has been no waste and no slack. Bamboo scaffolding around major buildings in Hong Kong seems flimsy and insubstantial. In fact, it is very strong because it is flexible, and stresses and strains are shared all around.
Efficiency is often the enemy of flexibility, and in today’s business world, flexibility is becoming more and more important."

Não é comum encontrar quem me acompanhe na crítica à paranóia do eficientismo.

E aquele "Very efficient businesses are often very brittle" é uma das lições que se pode tirar do postal dos almoços grátis de 2008:

Quanto mais pura é uma estratégia maior a rentabilidade, mas também maior o risco se o mundo muda.

Excerto de: Edward De Bono. “Sur/petition”. Apple Books. 

"denser systems will produce more turbulence"

Há anos que escrevo aqui sobre o perigo dos hospitais-cidade, das escolas-cidade e outros. Por exemplo:

• A abominação da eficiência - o anti-Mongo (parte I)

Entretanto ontem, durante uma caminhada matinal li:

"The Belgian Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine examined the origins of change in the reactions he studied. He concluded that all systems that are sufficiently complex can develop unpredictable emergent behavior. This includes social systems. The origins of this conclusion lie in positive feedback loops embedded in the system, producing boom and bust behavior that is difficult if not impossible to predict. From this he surmised that denser systems (for example, increasing population density and communication links) will produce more turbulence, that is, more complex interactions that produce virtually unpredictable emergent states and patterns of behavior."

Trecho retirado de “Strategic Reframing” de Rafael Ramirez e Angela Wilkinson.

Inovação e curiosidade

Muitas vezes vejo artigos sobre inovação a confundir variabilidade com variedade.

Inovação tem tudo a ver com variedade, e variedade com curiosidade e criatividade.

"Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought.
...
Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies.
...
Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. [Moi ici: Aumentar a eficiência passa por reduzir a variabilidade. É a cozinha do McDonald's, experiências não são permitidas - execução, execução, execução]
...
My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
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Twice a week for four weeks, half of them received a text message at the start of their workday that read, “What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”"

Trechos retirados de "Why Curiosity Matters"

Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica

Há anos que escrevo aqui no blogue sobre Mongo.
Já usei esse marcador 1347 vezes, a primeira em Agosto de 2010.
A primeira vez que usei essa metáfora aqui no blogue foi em Novembro de 2007 com "A cauda longa e o planeta Mongo".

No mundo em que trabalho vejo cada vez mais exemplos de empresas que seguem o caminho de Mongo porque é uma boa alternativa para fugir do embate directo com os gigantes que competem pela eficiência. Como escrevo aqui há milhares de anos, competir pelo preço não é para quem quer, é para quem pode. E quase nenhuma PME pode. [Recordar Agosto de 2006]

Seguir o caminho de Mongo é também uma boa opção para subir na escala de valor, aproveitar o poder do numerador, praticar o Evangelho do Valor e aumentar a produtividade muito mais do que só com base no denominador.

O meu mundo profissional não costuma ser o mundo das empresas grandes, das empresas cotadas na bolsa e das empresas com accionistas de curto-prazo. Esse outro mundo onde raramente entro é um mundo que vejo como dominado por uma doença, a doença anglo-saxónica (Fevereiro de 2014 e Julho de 2019). Só conhecem a eficiência para aumentar a produtividade, não sabem que a criatividade é muito mais eficaz a consegui-lo. Pensam que a paisagem competitiva continua a ser a da figura da esquerda quando estamos cada vez mais na da direita:

Conhecem Kevin O'Leary? Ele é o paradigma da doença amplo-saxónica, produto do século XX. (Atenção ao post scrcriptum no final deste postal)

Este mês de Agosto tem sido fértil em leituras sobre esta temática, mas sobre o ponto de vista de quem trabalha sobretudo com empresas grandes. Por exemplo, esta manhã li "Reflections of a business guru":

"The experience led him to reflect on the “curse of efficiency”. Organisations focus so much on efficiency that they fail to be effective. [Moi ici: Isto até arrepia de tão em linha com a comparação que costumamos fazer aqui entre eficácia e eficiência Eficácia, eficiência, e produtividade e Apostar no numerador, no valor e não no lápis vermelho (parte II)] Instead of concentrating on their core goal, they pay attention to narrower measures like cutting costs, or reducing the inconvenience suffered by their staff. Examples of the problem can be found in many places."

Mas a lista é longa, por exemplo:

• Reli "Rethinking Efficiency" que já comentei aqui "Acerca do eficientismo" (Dezembro de 2018)
• How Serious Are You About "Shareholder Value Is Not Everything"?
• Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say
• Reli "Managing for the Long Term"
• General Electric: US giant hits back over $38bn fraud claim

Já por várias vezes tive discordâncias no Twitter com gente da minha área política porque para eles o grande objectivo é que as empresas tenham lucro. Para mim, ter lucro é uma consequência não o objectivo. Para mim, ter lucro é uma condição de sobrevivência não a razão de ser de um negócio. Aquilo a que John Kay chama de obliquity.

"scalable efficiency is becoming less and less efficient"

Trechos em linha com o que escrevemos aqui há muitos anos. Mongo rules!

"Over the past century, [Moi ici: Recordar "Tão século XX" e "O fim do modelo económico do século XX"] the scalable efficiency model has driven the growth and success of large institutions around the world – corporations, governments, universities, NGO’s, etc. In this model, the primary focus is how to perform complex tasks very efficiently and reliably at scale. The way to achieve this has been to tightly specify and highly standardize all tasks. In a more stable world, this produced significant efficiency.
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But here’s the challenge. Our world is no longer stable. It’s evolving at an accelerating rate with growing uncertainty. Customers are also being more powerful and less and less willing to settle for standardized, mass market products and services. The combination of these two forces creates a paradox: scalable efficiency is becoming less and less efficient."

Trechos retirados de "Learning and Strategy"

Vamos fazer uma breve paragem na publicação de postais durante os próximos dias para poder concentrar a atenção em alguns projectos.

exploitation através de local searches quando a paisagem competitiva está em mudança

Em Fevereiro último escrevi ""profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta"".

O que fez a Kraft Heinz no início do ano? Escolheu um novo CEO com um passado na indústria cervejeira moldado no sucesso através do volume e eficiência. Agora apanho "Kraft Heinz shares slump on new writedowns and falling sales":

"Kraft Heinz, the Warren Buffett-backed food company, has disclosed another $1.2 billion (€1.07 billion) of write-downs, on top of the $15 billion charge it took earlier this year to reflect how shoppers have been shunning its brands.
.
Its shares fell 13 per cent on Thursday morning, taking the decline for the year to 38 per cent." 

Empresa a precisar de um corte epistemológico, a precisar de ir em busca de uma nova estratégia corporativa, opta por continuar a sua busca por óptimos locais na paisagem competitiva enrugada, quando os picos do passado estão a afundar-se por alteração da percepção dos clientes.

Recordar:

• "Warns of Margin Threat as Niche Brands Disrupt Industry" (Março de 2019)  
• O século XX continua por cá (parte III) (Julho de 2017) 
• Porque não somos plankton... (Agosto de 2014)

Relacionar com este texto de Seth Godin "The old media/new media chasm":

"New media tends to be adopted by amateurs first. And it rarely has a mass audience in the early days (because it’s new). But professional content for the masses is precisely what old media stands for. As new media gains traction, the old media doubles down on what they believe to be their value, because they no longer have a monopoly on attention.
...
So the Times publishes a snarky, poorly written takedown of podcasts. Not because it’s based on the economic or cultural reality of today, but because their self-esteem requires there to be a chasm between all of these amateur podcasts and the few professional ones that they deign to create and publish.
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Businesses make their own choices and suffer the consequences."

E volto a há dias atrás:

"Três grupos:

• os que agem ao primeiro sinal e partem em exploration de novas alternativas;

• os que por cegueira ou incapacidade continuam a sua vida de exploitation através de local searches; e

• os que assumem a exploitation até ao fim, conscientes de que mesmo assim, terão de fazer a sua mudança, porque os dois primeiros grupos vão libertar quota de mercado, voluntária ou involuntariamente."

Speed to market

Um conjunto de frases retiradas do podcast "Inside H&M’s $4B Inventory Challenge | Inside Fashion" que o amigo Pedro Alves me enviou.

"Focus should be speed to market

Speed has to be the primary asset and capability. Speed is a way to reduce cost and reduce risk.

Cost of lost sales

Cost of high markdowns

Cost of high inventory

Speed is more than being trendy

Speed is primary

A very digital world but it is an analog supply chain depending on lowest cost countries and long lead times supplied by sea

The high cost of low cost: there is a cost to being slow and being in 12 month design cycles and 6/9 months delivery cycles."

E regressamos a 2006 e a um texto sobre isto "O regresso dos clientes" que cita um artigo de 2004. Ou seja, alguém em 2004 publicou um artigo sobre os perigos do modelo eficientista, e em 2019 ainda  vemos tantas empresas mergulhadas nesse modelo. Algumas com sucesso e muitas a perder dinheiro e valor das marcas. Isto faz-me recordar um trecho retirado de um livro que não consigo identificar, julgo que de Adrian Slywotzky, e tenho 8 ou 9 livros dele, sobre o negócio dos televisores a preto e branco. Quando apareceu a TV a cores os televisores a preto e branco ficaram condenados à morte. Uns concorrentes sairam logo desse mercado, outros foram empurrados e mortos sem alternativa, até que ficaram aqueles que assumiram esse mercado até ao fim e ganharam dinheiro a explorar os nichos em que uma televisão a cores é suficiente porque o que conta é o preço, como o das televisões para segurança.

Três grupos:

• os que agem ao primeiro sinal e partem em exploration de novas alternativas;
• os que por cegueira ou incapacidade continuam a sua vida de exploitation através de local searches; e
• os que assumem a exploitation até ao fim, conscientes de que mesmo assim, terão de fazer a sua mudança, porque os dois primeiros grupos vão libertar quota de mercado, voluntária ou involuntariamente.

Voltando ao podcast: em que grupo se enquadra a H&M?

É que não basta decidir mudar...

"First, strategy exists in managers’ minds—in their theories about the world and their company’s place in it. Second, strategy is embodied, reified in a firm’s activities, and routines. Understanding the origins of strategy therefore requires a grasp of how its two aspects— the mental and the physical—jointly come into being. That is, it requires the characterization of a two-part search process. One part occurs in the world of cognition and comprises the mental processes that mold particular theories about the firm and its environment. The other unfolds in the world of action and consists of mechanisms that shape what a company actually does."

Além da decisão é preciso re-orientar toda uma organização habituada e moldada a uma certa forma de trabalhar. Basta comprar o que está por trás da Zara e o que está por trás da H&M antes de chegar à prateleira.


Trecho retirado de "On the Origin of Strategy: Action and Cognition over Time" de Giovanni Gavetti, e Jan W. Rivkin, publicado em Organization Science Vol. 18, No. 3, May–June 2007, pp. 420–439.

Credo na boca

Eficientismo com o credo na boca versus a lição dos nabateus:

• Eficácia, eficiência, e produtividade (Agosto de 2011)
• A lição dos nabateus acerca da eficiência e da eficácia (Março de 2015)
• A lição dos nabateus e a crença nos números (Maio de 2015)

É o que vem logo à mente, depois de ler "Investing in slack":

"Systems with slack are more resilient. The few extra minutes of time aren’t wasted, the same way that a bike helmet isn’t wasted if you don’t have a crash today. That buffer will save the day, sooner or later.
...
The mistake happens when we over-index on the easily measured short-term wins and forget to account for the costs of system failure.
.
Competitive environments push profit seekers to reduce slack and to play a short-term game. If your organization hits the wall, the market will survive, because we have other options. But that doesn’t mean you will survive.
.
Slack is actually a bargain."

"context and framing matter”

“we should remember that if you design something in a certain way, people can perceive something which doesn’t exist in reality.
.
What really is and what we perceive can be very different.
This is where physical laws diverges from psychological ones. And it is this very divergence which makes Alchemy possible.
...
In the same way, you cannot describe someone’s behaviour based on what you see, or what you think they see, because what determines their behaviour is what they think they are seeing. This distinction applies to almost anything: what determines the behaviour of physical objects is the thing itself, but what determines the behaviour of living creatures is their perception of the thing itself.
...
If you are a scientist, your job is to reach beyond the quirks of human perception and create universally applicable laws that describe objective reality. Science has developed sensors and units of measurement, which measure distance, time, temperature, colour, gravity and so on. In the physical sciences we quite rightly prefer these to warped perceptual mechanisms: it does not matter whether a bridge looks strong – we need to know that it really is strong.
.
A problem arises when human sciences – politics, economics or medicine, say – believe this universalism to be the hallmark of a science and “pursue the same approach; in the human sciences, just as in TV design, what people perceive is sometimes more important than what is objectively true.
...
In physics and engineering, objective models usually make problems easier to solve, while in economics and politics objectivity might make things harder. Some pressing economic and political issues could be solved easily and cheaply if we abandoned dogmatic universal models; just as TV designers don’t wrestle with the problem of producing the entire spectrum of visible light, policy-makers, designers and businessmen would be wise to spend less time trying to improve objective reality and more time studying human perception and moral instinct.
...
Economic logic is an attempt to create a psychology-free model of human behaviour based on presumptions of rationality, but it can be a very costly mistake. Not only can a rational approach to pricing be very destructive of perceived savings, but it also assumes that everyone reacts to savings the same way. They don’t, and context and framing matter.”

Trecho retirado de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Mongo e magia (parte IX)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII e parte VIII.

“no one believes in magic any more. Yet magic does still exist – it is found in the fields of psychology, biology and the science of perception, rather than in physics and chemistry. And it can be created.
...
We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.
...
but had got it into their heads that the value of something lies solely in what it is. This was a false assumption, because you don’t need to tinker with atomic structure to make lead as valuable as gold – all you need to do is to tinker with human psychology so that it feels as valuable as gold. At which point, who cares that it isn’t actually gold?
.
If you think that’s impossible, look at the paper money in your wallet or purse; the value is exclusively psychological. Value resides not in the thing itself, but in the minds of those who value it. You can therefore create (or destroy) value it in two ways – either by changing the thing or by changing minds about what it is.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Mongo e magia (parte VIII)

Parte I , parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI e parte VII.

Um texto que parece tirado deste blogue:

“Business, technology and, to a great extent, government have spent the last several decades engaged in an unrelenting quest for measurable gains in efficiency. [Moi ici: No caso dos governos basta recordar a paranóia das escolas-cidade e hospitais-cidade, basta recordar o meu ataque ao eficientismo e ao denominador, o desconhecimento do Evangelho do Valor] However, what they have never asked, is whether people like efficiency as much as economic theory believes they do. The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism.
.
The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.
When every function of a business is looked at from the same narrow economic standpoint, the same game is applied endlessly. Define something narrowly, automate or streamline it – or remove it entirely – then regard the savings as profit.
...
[Moi ici: Recordar quando falo dos Muggles e daqueles que não nutrem relações de amor com clientes, produtos e serviços] Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the invention of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analysts, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyse, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet. There is no need to prove that your cost-saving works empirically, as long as it is consistent with standard economic theory. It is a simple principle of business that, however badly your decision turns out, you will never be fired for following economics, even though its predictive value lies somewhere between water divining and palmistry.”

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

"fabulously efficient"

Há dias num programa na TV cabo onde dois indivíduos percorrem a América profunda em busca de antiguidades, um deles delirou ao encontrar os restos de uma bicicleta de 1880. Isso foi motivo para passarem imagens de marcas de bicicletas dos nos 20 e 30 do século passado. Nessas imagens o que mais me marcou foi a muita preocupação com o design e a pouca preocupação com a eficiência pura e dura.

“Likewise it is absurd for the French to have so many local varieties of cheese, and yet this variety and scarcity seems to add to our pleasure. Contrast it with the US cheese industry thirty years ago – which was fabulously efficient and centred on a small number of states. In the 1990s there seemed to be only two varieties of cheese, a yellow one and an orange one, and neither was much good. Similarly, before the recent revolution in craft beer, the range and quality of American beer was dismal; however, since American brewing has become magnificently diverse and inefficient, the US has gone from being the worst country for a beer drinker to visit, to the best.”

Recordar estes delírios.

Considerar este título "Consumo de cerveja artesanal bate recordes".

"Diversificação da oferta agrada aos portugueses, que são os principais consumidores fora de casa na Europa.
...
entre abril de 2017 e abril de 2019, as vendas desta categoria de cervejas cresceram 88% em valor e 112% em quantidade, num mercado global que evoluiu 8% em valor e 5% em quantidade, no mesmo período. Considerado apenas o último ano, o acréscimo foi de 10% em valor e 15% em quantidade, três a cinco vezes mais do que os 3% do mercado total de cervejas."

Pensar na race-to-the-bottom entre cervejeiras industriais que julgam que o preço e a eficiência são tudo. E como não recuar a Loulé em Novembro de 2007?

Trechos retirados de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

Mongo e magia (parte IV)

Parte I , parte II e parte III.

Há anos que falo da tríade e do seu foco no eficientismo, os encalhados.

“In theory, you can’t be too logical, but in practice, you can. Yet we never seem to believe that it is possible for logical solutions to fail. After all, if it makes sense, how can it possibly be wrong?
...
Highly educated people don’t merely use logic; it is part of their identity. When I told one economist that you can often increase the sales of a product by increasing its price, the reaction was one not of curiosity but of anger.
...
This book is not an attack on the many healthy uses of logic or reason, but it is an attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale before it can even be considered or attempted.
...
We could never have evolved to be rational – it makes you weak.
...
A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather.
...
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you."

Por que é que tantos académicos e comentadores previram o fim das PMEs? (recordar aqui e aqui, por exemplo) Porque o enquadramento lógico, o seu modelo ambiental, impedi-os de ver, ou de suspeitar que existiam alternativas. Quem as descobriu? Os livres de modelos mentais castradores (recordar aqui), os ignorantes e a sua vantagem (recordar aqui).

“Evolution, too, is a haphazard process that discovers what can survive in a world where some things are predictable but others aren’t. It works because each gene reaps the rewards and costs from its lucky or unlucky mistakes, but it doesn’t care a damn about reasons. It isn’t necessary for anything to make sense: if it works it survives and proliferates; if it doesn’t, it diminishes and dies. It doesn’t need to know why it works – it just needs to work.”

Trecho retirado de "Alchemy: Or, the Art and Science of Conceiving Effective Ideas That Logical People Will Hate" de Rory Sutherland.

"move beyond a focus on efficiency"

"For many companies, the traditional path to value creation is simply too narrow, centered on driving efficiencies rather than growth and innovation. Creating new value often requires employers to think differently about work in three ways:
.
The objective of work becomes expanding value, not delivering scalable efficiency.
The work itself entails addressing unseen problems and opportunities, not executing routine tasks.
The work draws on human capabilities such as imagination, intuition, curiosity, creativity, and empathy—not on skills tied to a particular task or technology.[Moi ici: Recordem os profetas do Armagedão provocado pela automatização]
With this broader view, companies can move beyond a focus on efficiency—and beyond growth driven by M&A and market share—and aim to create new forms of customer value. Organizations can do this by looking for ways to create additional meaning for the customer. This typically starts by deeply understanding customers’ needs and aspirations, now and in the future—and deep understanding requires more than just soliciting customer feedback or monitoring net promoter scores. Because these needs and aspirations are limitless and rapidly evolving, there is always more value that companies can create for customers."

Parece um texto retirado deste blogue ...

A aposta no numerador versus o eficientismo da aposta no denominador.

A aposta na originação do valor.

A treta da tríade, apesar de tudo, vai precisar ainda de alguns anos, talvez 10 a 20 para ser varrida para o caixote do lixo da história. Economia não é física newtoniana ou galilaica, em economia o que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira.

Trechos retirados de "Redefine Work to Bring New Value to Customers"