"we must redefine art"

Em "A alternativa", um postal de maio de 2016, e em "A ascensão do artesão e da arte na produção, um postal de Abril de 2017, voltei à arte como a alternativa para fugir às estratégias cancerosas que nunca serão sustentáveis num país pequeno e pouco habituado a rigor e planeamento.

Como diria MacGyver:

That's our edge!

É afinal o twist na estória de David vs Golias, enquanto Saúl pensava que o puto David ia combater de igual para igual, David tira um seixo branco de um saco só com seixos pretos (parte I e parte II).

Ontem, apanhei este texto de Esko Kilpi, "Art, entrepreneurship and the future of work":

"Art creates suggestions for fresh ways of defining the world we live in.
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Artists are like entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are like artists. They turn nothings into somethings. Thus, artists give a form to ideas that for some other people might be nothing more than vague notions or emotional impulses. But it is often not easy.
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Fostering creativity is a genuine goal for all in the post-industrial society. A creative economy needs individuals with the freedom, courage and capacity to think, learn and live imaginatively. We need people who can conceive ideas and who can realize them. Maybe all schools in the future are going to be art schools and all offices creative studios.[Moi ici: Mas não com a Nomenklatura que por lá anda agora]
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But we must redefine art. Art today often stands apart from everyday life. It is a pastime and an indulgence, admired in a gallery, museum or a concert hall from a contemplative distance.
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In the future art are not only objects we contemplate, but also experiences we possess and create."[Moi ici: Relacionar com o tema dos artesãos, dos nichos e Mongo]

"meaning cannot simply be discovered"

"People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.
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The challenge is that managers often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness rather that as an accurate and needed barometer of uncertainty.
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The reality is not an objective set of arrangements outside us, but is continually constructed in daily interaction.
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Because any information can mean a variety of things, meaning cannot simply be discovered. Information does not help. We have to talk!...
situations are progressively clarified in iterative interaction. Our reality is an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people together make sense of the situations in which they find themselves"

Trechos retirados de "Confusion and ambiguity"

"influence the formation of sense making and meaning"

"The idealistic view of a manager as one who is in control is not consistent with our practical experience, or with modern science. From the point of view of the sciences of complexity, an organization is not even a system, but should be understood as a pattern, or as interconnected patterns in time. [Moi ici: Um ponto de vista interessante que reforça o papel e importância da comunicação]
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These interconnected patterns are the results of self-organizing processes across the network forming the organization. Many events, local interactions generate emergent outcomes that cannot be traced back to any specific management action. Looking towards the future, we create what happens next, without knowing what will happen next.
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The organization, then, is no longer self-regulating in a cybernetic sense, but self-influencing in a complex sense. Self-influence as a concept is not necessarily positive, it can lead both to self-sustaining and self-destructive behaviors.
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The key management capability is not being in control, but to participate and influence the formation of sense making and meaning. It is about creating a context that enables connectedness, interaction and trust between people. [Moi ici: Outro insight poderoso, "influence the formation of sense making and meaning". Como desesperei interiormente há tempos, quando um empresário interpretava o meu conselho sobre a criação de um ecossistema da procura, como um convite para ligações pouco transparentes e até ilegais com outros actores]
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Most people believe that the role of leaders is to choose strategic directions and then persuade others to follow them. A modern view of strategy is about exploration and experiments, a search process of trial and error. [Moi ici: Não sou tão radical assim embora perceba a importância ads experiências. Recordo os "arbustos"] The openness to the possible through the search process leads to having to live with anxiety and not knowing. Work needs to equal learning."

Acerca dos arbustos:

“Typical strategic planning processes focus on chopping down the branches of the strategic decision tree, eliminating options, and making choices and commitments. In contrast, an evolutionary approach to strategy emphasizes creating choices, keeping options open, and making the tree of possibilities as bushy as possible at any point in time. Options have value. An evolving portfolio of strategic experiments gives the management team more choices, which means better odds that some of the choices will be right” … “The objective is to be able to make lots of small bets, and only make big bets as a part of amplifying successful experiments when uncertainties are much lower.” 

Trechos iniciais retirados de "The Future of Management"

"Work is interaction"

O marcador "interacção" regista a importância que ao longo dos anos dedico ao poder da interacção como fundamental para a co-criação de valor e diferenciação. Algo que agora encontro em "Strategy for a networked world" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

"The system of skills and responsibilities has been made on the assumption that all that has to be done can be known or forecasted with efficiency and insight.
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In mass-production, work corresponds mainly with what has been planned. But today, in more contextual problem solving, work corresponds mainly with complex engagement with the customer.
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Instead of skills the focus changes to contextual relevance. The most modern definition of work is “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”. Interestingly, cooperation is also described as “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”.
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Due to the variety of contexts, work requires interpretation, exploration and negotiation. The interpreter is the worker together with the customer, not a manager.[Moi ici: Como não sorrir ironicamente dos morons que se ajoelham perante o bezerro da eficiência e acham que um bot é capaz de co-criar arte com um humano...]
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What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent but connected and systemic. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what he believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Work, then, is exploration both what comes to defining the problems and finding the solutions.
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Most decision makers are still unaware of the implications of the complex, responsive properties of the world we live in. Enterprises are not organized to facilitate management of interactions, only the actions of parts taken separately. Even more, compensation structures normally rewards improving the actions of parts, not their interactions.
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To succeed in the new economic spaces we need symmetric relationships and open organizations. When customers are identified as individuals in different use contexts, also the sales process is really a joint process of solving problems. You and your customer necessarily then become cooperators. You are together trying to solve the customer’s problem in a way that both satisfies the customer and ensures a profit for you.
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The industrial make-and-sell model required (explicit) skills as we still know them. The decisive thing was your individual knowledge and individual education. Today, in new economic spaces you work more from your network than your skills. The decisive thing is your network. Work is interaction."

Trechos retirados de "Rethinking skills and responsibility"

"The industrial age was about limiting the scope of choices"

Quando penso em Mongo penso nesta mudança de paradigma e nas suas consequências:

"The industrial age was about limiting the scope of choices. This was accepted since the need to gather costly information and to communicate with low quality and expensive tools was minimized. Furthermore, as the scope of decision-making and action was narrowed, the learning requirements for workers and customers were limited, reducing the transaction costs of work. The efficiency contribution of mass production was in fact derived from these lower information- and communication-related costs.
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Today, in contrast to people being content with limited choices, offerings as problem definitions and solutions to problems are created on-demand to meet diverse, sometimes unique requirements.
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The context matters more than ever. The easier the access that people have to one another and to (different) information is, the more possibilities there are."

Mongo é acerca de uma explosão crescente de opções de escolha que vão dar cabo da noção de sociedade herdada da Revolução Francesa e da Revolução Industrial.

Vamos ver desaparecer a ideia de referencial, de família-modelo, de média como uma boa representação da sociedade.

Trechos retirados de "Interactive competence".

Eficiência quando se lida com gente é uma ideia louca

Este texto, "Toyota is not lean", sobre a aplicação do Lean e 6 sigma aos hospitais merece alguma reflexão.
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Primeiro, pelos números que mostra sobre o impacte do Lean e do 6 sigma em muitas corporações que os aplicaram. Recordar a série "Não culpem a caneta quando a responsabilidade é do escritor". Estas ferramentas são poderosas mas só fazem sentido serem aplicadas em contextos em que a eficiência é tudo.
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Segundo, apesar do que pensam os políticos por esse mundo fora, a começar por Portugal, entretidos a criar os tais hospitais-cidade em busca da eficiência redentora, num negócio como o da saúde, a eficiência não é o mais importante.

• "When is a company too big to manage?"
• Um clássico do "To Big To Care"
• Amor versus arame

Decididamente, eficiência quando se lida com gente é uma ideia louca.

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O futuro passa muito mais por reflexões deste tipo "From the industrial economy to the interactive economy".
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Ontem, apanhei estas pérolas de Esko Kilpi no Twitter:

"1/ value creation does not happen at the point of production, but at the point of use
2/ standard, generic solutions to customer problems are no longer as competitive as they have been
3/ transactions are replaced by interactive relationships
4/ greatest value creation is no longer related to resource management, or to production, but rather to the linking of interactions
All in all, production/service generation can no longer happen independently of the customer or of the context of the customer."

"The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business"

"The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the brain research proves it’s true. People relate to and remember stories— even people who make a living analyzing facts.
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A POV [point of vue] tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It tells the world why this category and the company creating it are different. Different sticks. Different forces a choice between what was and what can be. A POV built around better is about comparing your offering to the thing customers already know. Better reinforces the power of the category king you’re trying to beat (who by definition is not you). If customers think two companies are tied in the better wars, they just choose the category king—or the lowest price if there’s no clear king. A great POV takes you outside the better wars and sets you in a different space all your own."

Recordar "Para reflexão"

Para reflexão

"we could claim that organizations don't create value for the customers but the way customers uses the product create value.
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It is the experience of use that it is decisive.
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When we're drinking wine it is not only the product, the wine that we're drinking, it's also the restaurant setting that we're in, it's also the story, or the origin story of the wine, it's the interaction with the waiter who is telling about the wine, or the somellier and you ask questions and value is created through that interaction.
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You're talking about complementarities to the bottle of wine ... each and every product should link to something that complements it ... experiences, stories."

Quando no passado dia 13 de Junho passeei pelo Porto, visitei a loja de "A Vida Portuguesa", repleta de turistas. Ao dar de caras com esta caixa de lápis:

Reconheci logo os lápis que eu usava em 1970 na minha primeira classe. Depois, recordei um ou outro desenho da altura que fiz... e senti criar-se uma ligação com a criança que fui. Então, pensei, o que é que esta caixa de lápis diz aos turistas? Nada!
Talvez se pudesse criar uma "complementaridade" começando por enquadrar os lápis e referir que se trata da última fábrica de lápis da Península Ibérica. O mesmo que o somellier conta acerca do vinho.

"One interesting factor in all of this is that networks and the focus in interactions, it is now more expensive to internalize thank link and network. Is that mean that buildind large companies doesn«t make sense anymore?" [Moi ici: Eheheh! Conseguem adivinhar a resposta de Esko Kilpi?]

Empresas grandes são boas a extrair valor, empresas pequenas são boas a criar valor. Extrair trata do denominador. Criação trata do numerador.
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Evoluir da transacção para a interacção.
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Perceber que o essencial são relações.


Trechos retirados de "Esko Kilpi and the value of wine and interaction"

É isto que os humanos têm de procurar em Mongo!

É isto que os humanos têm de procurar em Mongo!

There is going to be two kinds of value: emergent value created in interaction by human beings and algorithmic value created by machines

— Esko Kilpi (@EskoKilpi) April 11, 2016

Non-algorithmic! Created in complex, context specific interaction, meaning that it is not repeatable, perhaps? :-) https://t.co/lankt62mQY

— Esko Kilpi (@EskoKilpi) April 11, 2016

"The strategic logic is temporal rather than spatial. When following a spatial metaphor, there is a territory that can be explored and understood by the leaders, but in the temporal logic the territory is seen as being under continuous development and formation by the exploration itself. “It is impossible to map an area that changes with every step the explorer takes.”
People inhabit a complex world of emergence, uncertainty and continuous change. Corporate life is improvising and learning together. It is an ongoing continuous exploration, a movement that is open-ended and always incomplete."

Trecho retirado de "Network leadership"

Valor, contexto e interacção

"Four fairly new insights are challenging our traditional beliefs:
1. Value creation happens at the point of use, not the point of production;
2. Mass solutions are not as competitive as contextual solutions;
3. Transactions are replaced by interactions because contextual value creation cannot take place without interaction;
4. Open networks and reach and richness of networking are more valuable than control of proprietary assets."

Não são novidades aqui no blogue.
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O ponto 4, em sintonia com "Uma evolução interessante", vem suportar o que penso: o avanço dos restaurantes não é por causa do controlo, é por causa da autenticidade.
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Trechos retirados de "Work and the games we play"

Mongo e o futuro do trabalho

Acompanho com atenção o que Esko Kilpi escreve no Twitter e fora dele. Ontem, resumiu, no Twitter, um workshop sobre o futuro do trabalho desta forma:

"By 2045 one-third of the workforce could be self-employed
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The most important change is that people are finding a way to keep working in a meaningful way beyond the traditional retirement age
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70% of the people who have become self-employed during the past three years are over 50 years old
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The personal finance industry (banks) is decades out of date in accommodating these changes
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Profound changes in the way we work are far outstripping the the ability of political parties to respond
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1/ We have to become better at finding customers and handling our personal finances
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2/ we have to understand that we don’t live in a world of  employers and employees any more
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3/ We have to understand the world of running a business better because we are going to run one, however small, at one time or another
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We are so attached to the idea of getting and keeping a job that we don’t grasp the scale and speed of changes with which work is changing
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Many of the people who become self-employed are in effect under-employed. They are working fewer hours than the they would like
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The drivers that have not been understood: the shift to services means much less predictability than in manufacturing
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The growing service industries need flexible labour. The shrinking ones are based on predictability and fixed labor
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Work is getting more creative. In creative and cultural industries it is normal for people to work for themselves and not for an employer."

Conseguem imaginar como muitos deputados classificariam estas afirmações?
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Conseguem relacionar estas afirmações e colocá-las no retrato do mundo económico do futuro a que chamo de Mongo?

Para pessoas e para PME

Aqui no blogue escreve sobre o advento do Estranhistão (ou Mongo). Ainda esta semana sublinhava uma mensagem da CEO da IBM que parecia retirada daqui:

"And value will be for individuals not for segments.
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You will see the death of average ... and instead you will see an era of YOU"

Esta tendência suporta uma narrativa deste blogue: a vida no futuro será cada vez mais difícil para os gigantes, porque as pessoas não querem ser tratadas como plankton e acham os gigantes "Too Big To Care".
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Talvez porque habite em Portugal, concentro-me em chamar a atenção das PME para o potencial que o Estranhistão carrega consigo. Para muitos pode parecer loucura mas para mim é tão claro que o futuro será muito mais risonho para as PME que com uma estratégia assumam a interacção, a co-criação de valor, as plataformas, os ecossistemas.
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Esko Kilpi, talvez porque habite na Finlândia, está um pouco mais à frente e já não pensa nas PME mas na etapa seguinte, nas pessoas, nos freelancers, nos empreendedores.
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Primeiro, a Finlândia. Enquanto a geração egoísta cá do burgo se empertigava toda por causa da reacção da Finlândia ao empréstimo a Portugal nós escrevíamos vários postais, desde 2009 até ao de Agosto de 2015 em "A lição finlandesa". A revista The Economist do passado dia 6 de Fevereiro traçava um retrato da actualidade finlandesa em "Permafrost". Não é um ambiente bonito. O velho continua a morrer e o novo ainda não mostra a sua graça, ou seja, os finlandeses ainda estão a fuçar, à procura de alternativas.
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É neste ambiente que Esko Kilpi escreve e é influenciado. E gostei muito de "A new agenda connecting people and business":

"The definition of an employee is “somebody who works for another person or a company for pay”. It is then not about you, but about what the other people want of you, and, they don’t really want you, but what you can do, your competences.
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The post-industrial revolution is a revolution in power. More and more opportunities are democratized. The new power is vested in knowledgeable people. Just as the industrial revolution catered to managers and firms, the post-industrial world rewards individuals and networks.
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[Moi ici: Acho interessante, na argumentação usada para as pessoas, o facto de eu a usar há anos aqui para as PME. Diferenciação, saber que há sempre uma alternativa ainda que tenha de ser construída, formulada, trabalhada] “Onlyness is what only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human.”
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I interpret “Onlyness” as a form of responsibility that grows from your own context. [Moi ici: Muito de effectuation também] Response-ability, the ability to choose what you do is one of the key work skills in the future. [Moi ici: O trecho que se segue é precioso. Quantas vezes aqui no blogue escrevemos sobre o discurso do coitadinho, o discurso do locus de controlo no exterior, o discurso da vítima...]  It is the polar opposite of the learned helplessness created during the industrial era. Learned helplessness is a belief that we are at the mercy of external forces, the managers, the employers, the markets, and not in control of what is happening to us. Martin Seligman claims that this feeling is not only learned but built in as a feature in many of our social systems, [Moi ici: Lê.se e como não recordar Constança Cunha e Sá e a sua indução de cortisol] where somebody else, by default, tells us what we should think and do. In the post-industrial world we need to make a conscious effort to clear our minds of learned helplessness. [Moi ici: O que pode passar por desistir dos media]
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[Moi ici: Reparar a seguir no paralelismo com o que escrevo para as PME em "Estratégia e pontos fortes, o ovo ou a galinha"] What would work be like if your own life, your own context would be the starting point? Should individuals then think like firms do? Just as companies today dissolve their boundaries and erase their hierarchies, so must the individual be ready to invent and reinvent herself. Many people have already started thinking this way.
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Knowledge of your abilities, interests, strengths and weaknesses is essential to becoming response-able in choosing and changing your career. These are the important personal criteria. However, the overwhelming majority of job seekers react to purely external criteria, the conditions created by employers or financial pressures. Huge life decisions often turn on external factors instead of one’s own directions for the future and the strongest practical skills one has. [Moi ici: Como não recordar esta lição] The legacy of the industrial age is strangely passive workers simply falling into their jobs. Too few people actively make a connection between what they are good at and what they do for a living. It is ironic that we wonder why people are not engaged.
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No human being is exactly like another. We are all unique combinations of talents and experiences that never existed before and will never exist again in quite the same way. No one has ever done precisely what you are now doing. No one has ever faced your future. But life is not something to step back from and admire. We never get it quite right. It is never perfect. Therefore it should always be under construction."

Prestes a cometer um crime (parte II)

"Profitability = Intellectual Capital X Price X Effectiveness"
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Volto a pegar nesta equação... para a usar na leitura de "The Open Economy":

"To understand Apple’s problem, let’s look at the iPhone, which makes up more than 60% of the company’s revenues. In terms of raw materials, it’s probably not worth more than a few bucks, yet people gladly pay $649 to buy one. The difference, MIT’s Cesar Hidalgo argues in his new book, Why Information Grows
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, is what he calls “crystallized imagination.”
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Apple is a very special company because it has mastered the art of crystallizing imagination in its products in such a way that they are more desirable—and hence more valuable—than anything anyone else can produce. The problem for Apple, however, is that there is a lot more imagination in the world than Apple can control by itself.
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The truth is that we can’t think of competitiveness as a strictly internal matter anymore. We no longer operate in an industrial economy in which we can gain competitive advantage merely through engineering greater efficiency. Rather, we need to widen and deepen connections.
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So we can’t continue to think of success in terms of clawing our way to the top of the heap. Rather, we need to learn to position ourselves at the center of networks. Nobody, not even a company as special as Apple, can succeed alone."

Agora, comparar o que penso acerca da concorrência em Mongo aqui, com este pre-crime para satisfazer os incumbentes e a reacção destes outros incumbentes noutras paragens. Depois, voltar a ler aquele trecho "we need to learn to position ourselves at the center of networks". Depois, talvez estudar o que Esko Kilpi reflecte sobre as redes.

Na equação, aquele Capital Intelectual não é, quase sempre, sobre os conhecimentos académicos dos operários, dos executantes, (afinal é o mesmo operário que salta do Vale do Ave para Munique), é sobre a capacidade de decisão dos que têm poder e autoridade para mudar as empresas e/ou as associações.
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Quão conservadora é a sua PME?

Há anos que escrevemos aqui no blogue acerca da visão arcaica da produtividade que herdámos do século XX e do Normalistão.
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Toda a gente sabe que a produtividade portuguesa é baixa, cerca de 65% da média da OCDE. Como é que se aumenta a produtividade?
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Toda a gente sabe que o aumento da produtividade se consegue com mais produção. E como é que se consegue mais produção? Trabalhando mais horas ou, trabalhando com mais afinco em cada hora.... engraçado como estas são aos propostas da direita e da esquerda no Twitter.
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Pois... recomendo a leitura de mais um texto de Esko Kilpi "A new definition of productivity" com esta provocação:

"The industrial firm is a conservative institution. It tries to maintain stability and often tries to maintain the problems that it was originally the solution to. But the organization of post-industrial society is a disruptor and reformer because its function is to put new knowledge to work – which means to learn. It must be organized for constant change because to learn means to change. It must be prepared for the systematic abandonment of the established and the familiar.
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The task today is asking: “If we did not do this already, would we go into it knowing what we know now and knowing what technologies and new tools have become available?” If the answer is “No”, the next question to ask is: “How could we plan abandonment rather than try to prolong the life of outdated practices?”"

Quão conservadora é a sua PME?
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Continua

Concorrência vs cooperação em Mongo

Considerem a metáfora de Mongo onde reina a concorrência imperfeita.

Concorrência imperfeita significa que não se podem fazer comparações directas entre as ofertas da empresa A e as ofertas da empresa B, porque elas são diferentes, destinam-se a necessidades diferentes ou a contextos diferentes, ainda que possam ter designações semelhantes.
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Fazendo o paralelismo com a biologia recordo esta história com maçãs em "Mongo também passa por este regresso ao passado" e, esta outra em "Qual é o verdadeiro produto que a nossa agricultura pode oferecer? (parte II)" que me fez descobrir que há maçãs todo o ano e que uma Spartan não concorre com uma Braeburn ou uma Golden Delicious.
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Ontem, o @pauloperes recomendou-me a leitura de um texto de Esko Kilpi "Redefining work" onde se pode ler:

"But what if high performance is incorrectly attributed to competition and is more a result of diversity, self-organizing communication and non-competitive processes of cooperation?.
Competitive processes lead to the handicapping of the system that these processes are part of. This is because competitive selection leads to exclusion: something or somebody, the losers, are left outside. Leaving something out from an ecosystem always means a reduction of diversity. The resulting less diverse system is efficient in the short-term, competition seems to work, but always at the expense of long-term viability. [Moi ici: Recordar Valikangas e o valor da diversidade para enfrentar os choques violentos do inesperado] Sustainability, agility and complex problem solving require more diversity, not less.
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In games that were paradoxically competitive and cooperative at the same time, losers would not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners. What prevents losers learning from winners is our outdated zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all philosophy.
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In competitive games the players need to have the identical aim of winning the same thing. Unless all the players want the same thing, there cannot be a genuine contest. Human players and their contributions are, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively. Zero-sum games were the offspring of scarcity economics. In the post-industrial era of abundant creativity and contextuality, new human-centric approaches are needed.[Moi ici: Mongo!!!]
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[Moi ici: Este trecho que se segue é muito interessante] The games we play have been played under the assumption that the unit of survival is the player, meaning the individual or a company. However, at the time of the Anthropocene, the reality is that the unit of survival is the player in the game being played. Following Darwinian rhetoric, the unit of survival is the species in its environment. Who wins and who loses is of minor importance compared to the decay of the (game) environment as a result of the actions of the players."[Moi ici: Desconfio que esta citação me vai acompanhar muitas vezes]

Percebo isto e penso isto há muitos anos, os consultores "meus concorrentes" são minhas testemunhas. Entretanto, numa caminhada ao final da tarde li "Brewing Together Works Better in the Craft Beer Industry" e pensei:
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- UAU! Que grande encaixe!!!

"“I will return a call from anyone in the craft-beer industry who wants to talk,” he says. “Fritz and the other early craft brewers set that tone.”
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Fifty years after Maytag bought Anchor Brewing and introduced craft beer to America, the sector’s esprit de corps extends well beyond friendly chats. Craft brewers open their doors to others. They share equipment and help train one another’s staffs. Trade secrets? Craft brewers take pride in having none.
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cooperation fuels the growth, he says, not the other way around. Brewers have created a virtuous cycle that other industries ought to copy.
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Any business sector that can be described as “craft,” “artisan” or “local” can benefit from collaboration among competitors,
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Collaboration set the stage for the current craft-beer boom. “The craft category would not be what it is today if craft brewers hadn’t collaborated,” says Mike Kallenberger, a former Miller Brewing executive who now consults with craft brewers. “This category grew almost entirely by word-of-mouth, with virtually no advertising at all. The more they helped each other, the more people drank craft beer.”"

Separo o trecho que se segue porque suspeito que é outro que me vai acompanhar de futuro:

"Cooperation makes sense when “a segment needs to share knowledge to legitimize itself and increase sales in a battle against a common enemy,” says Sutton, citing the open-source software developers who created their collaborative culture to battle Microsoft’s dominance of the industry. “With a named enemy, an industry segment becomes a social movement.”" 

Acerca do trabalho em Mongo

"The post-industrial era is too complicated to boil down into a single slogan describing work, but three scenarios seem to be emerging: (1) processes are automatized and robotized, leading to an algorithmic economy, (2) generic work is found through platforms, or turned into tasks circling the world, leading to a platform economy, and (3) context-specific value creation takes place in interaction between interdependent people, leading to an entrepreneurial economy.
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I believe that the future of human work is situated. Even after the captains are automated, the pilots may still be human beings. Even after the surgeons are robots, the nurses may still human beings.
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It is not about employees becoming contractors. It is about generic, mass-solutions becoming contextual and about interchangeable people who are now, perhaps for the first time, seen as unique. The case for networked small units, such as human beings working together in responsive interaction, is stronger than ever.
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What is most desperately needed is a deeper understanding of the complexity of life."

Trechos retirados de "The post-industrial economies"

Não confundir com perigosa propaganda neoliberal, é só a biologia a funcionar

Mais sintomas do avanço de Mongo:

Para a maioria isto é perigosa propaganda neoliberal, para mim é a simples evolução de uma etapa da economia para outra etapa.
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Não a considero nem melhor nem pior em si mesma. Considero-a a mais adequada para um novo ecossistema. Há 150 anos a maioria dos cidadão de um país não eram empregados de uma empresa ou do Estado. Hoje, são-no. No futuro, talvez não.

• The Gig Economy Is Real If You Know Where to Look
• (A visão pessimistas tinha de vir destes senhores) The ‘gig economy’ is coming. What will it mean for work? (Penso em termos de evolução, por que há-de um trabalhador ficar preso de uma plataforma para sempre? Recordar isto, isto, isto e isto)
• (E por que é que uma revista como a Fortune publica um artigo com este título?) The case against the 'gig economy'. (Qual é o cliente-alvo da revista? Não será a empresa grande que pode ser disrupcionada por uma qualquer plataforma?)
• Advancing, not retreating 

"It is true that some of these new websites undermine existing business models, just as file-sharing wrecked music-publishing companies.
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By reducing the cost of information, the internet kills some business models. But not all.
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Many more people are likely to be self-employed, offering services to a wide range of customers. In a sense, they will be artisans, not employees. Activities such as sales, marketing and accounting—matters that salaried employees leave in the hands of specialist colleagues—will become the responsibility of the individual. Such workers will have to be more, not less, sensitive to the market economy than the typical office drone."

• The Future of Firms. Is There an App for That? 

"The existence of high transaction costs outside firms led to the emergence of the firm as we know it, and management as we still have it. A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed.
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What really matters now is the reverse side of the Coasean argumentation. If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically as is happening today, the form and logic of economic entities necessarily need to change! Coase’s insight turned around is the number one driver of change today! The traditional firm is the more expensive alternative almost by default. This is something that he did not see coming.
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Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed when coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible. This is the main difference between Uber and old taxi services. Apps can now do what managers used to do.
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For most of the developed world, firms, as much as markets, make up the dominant economic pattern. The Internet is nothing less than an extinction-level event for the traditional firm. The Internet, together with technological intelligence, makes it possible to create totally new forms of economic entities, such as the “Uber for everything” -type of platforms/service markets that we see emerging today. Very small firms can do things that in the past required very large organizations. [Moi ici: O que lêem os que frequentam os Encontros da Junqueira ou os Avelinos de Jesus?]
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We stand on the threshold of an economy where the familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant."

A economia co-evoluiu em função do meio que também altera, é uma continuação da biologia.

O poder do ecossistema

Se se pesquisar neste blogue a palavra e o marcador "ecossistema", pode avaliar-se o quanto aprecio o seu poder, fruto de uma experiência profissional no Verão de 2004.
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Nos últimos dias, sem esforço, tenho coleccionado referências ao tema:

• "How Power Is Shifting From Corporations To Platforms"

"In the old corporate economy, transactions went one way.  Firms would manage a value chain in order to deliver a superior product at a lower cost.  Yet today, transactions are multi-sided.  Firms not only need to court customers, but also others that will enhance their platform." [Moi ici: Um texto cheio de sumo!]

• "What Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba Have in Common" 

"Our business model classification and analysis yielded some surprising results. Network Orchestrators outperform companies with other business models on several key dimensions."

• "A Service Lens on Value Creation: Marketing's Role in Achieving Strategic Advantage" de Lance A. Bettencourt, Robert F. Lusch e Stephen L. Vargo, publicado no número de Outono de 2014 da California Management Review.

"It is not necessary that a resource be owned by a firm to be effectively integrated into its value proposition." 

•  "From systems to ecosystems"

"In contrast to the industrial era, when value was added primarily in the repetitive manufacturing processes, value is today created elsewhere, outside of the old industrial system. Value is co-created in the context of usage [Moi ici: Service Dominant Logic, interacção, co-criação, experiência] through customizable, reconfigurable and more or less unique solutions aggregated by the customer, not the manufacturer.
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Instead of focusing on whether some managers institute more efficient processes or design the division of work better than others, ecosystem theory suggests that the properties of communication and connection between people are the causes of success. [Moi ici: Co-criação, interacção, customização] What the ecosystem becomes, emerges from the relationships of its members.
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Value creation cannot be understood as industrial systems any more, but as continuously developing, complex, responsive ecosystems of connected people."

•  "O mercado como um forum de co-criação"

"Co-creation also challenges the view of the market as an aggregation of consumers who must select from what the firm decides to offer. In the new value creation space, business managers have at least partial control over the experience environment and the networks they build to facilitate co-creation experiences."

• "Acerca do ecossistema da procura"

"The idea of value co-creation in a network includes the idea of reciprocity, that is not only should one be freed from a dyadic perspective, but also from the provider–customer notion." 

Perhaps

"Perhaps in the future it will not be meaningful to conceptualize work as jobs or even as organizational (activity) structures like the firms of today. Work will be described as complex patterns of communicative interaction between interdependent individuals, or something else along these lines.
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Perhaps it is time to change the focus from creating jobs to creating customers  -  in new, innovative and interactive ways. To quote Max Planck: “If you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change.”"

Trechos retirados de "Work is Interaction"

O futuro pode muito bem passar por meter código naquilo que já existe (parte II)

Há dias escrevi "O futuro pode muito bem passar por meter código naquilo que já existe". Agora, leio um interessante texto de Esko Kilpi, "The Internet of Things".
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Quem trabalha comigo sabe o peso e apreço que dou à criação de pontos de interacção entre clientes e a empresa, como fonte potencial geradora de oportunidades de co-criação de valor. Por isso:

"Different customers use products that are manufactured in the same way, with the same product features, differently. This is why customers are today understood to be active contributors to value creation. Without their part, the value of the product could not exist. “Consumption” really means value creation, not value destruction. You could even claim that the word consumer is misleading. It should not be used any more!
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The parties “help each other to help each other” in active interaction. Value creation is an interaction process. As the goal is to create more value together, a critically important new element is the digital code that is attached to the “thing”, the offering, the product or the service.
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In the age of the Internet of Things, all products are software products. The value of the code may determine the value potential of a product more than the physical product itself. The effectiveness of an offering is related to how well it (1) packages the learning from past activities and (2) how it increases the users options for value creation through network connections in the present.
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(Moi ici: E para meter o ecossistema da procura ao barulho) The ability to create value in a remarkably more efficient and resource-wise way corresponds to possibilities for interaction with other relevant parts and actors. If interdependent links are few, poor, or constraining, the activity and value potential will be limited."