Sonhar com o futuro...

"Those in power tend to describe the world as us and not-us. White and non-white citizens. Apple products and non-Apple fans. Mass and non-mass (we even made a fancy French name for it: niche).
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This will get you only so far, and not very far at that. The revolution that we’re living through has many facets, and a profound and overlooked one is that mass is not the center any longer. Us and not-us is a dead end.
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Instead, consider a lens that sees Lisa, Ishita, and Rafit. There is no us. No mass. No center. (Moi ici: É o fim da miudagem, é o fim dos fantasmas estatísticos, é o olhar olhos nos olhos) Our culture is now is a collection of tribes, and each tribe is a community of interests, many of whom get along, some that don’t.
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We all share communication tools. Most of us share the same three or four languages. We all share the same planet. But we’re not the same. We’re people with choices, and we won’t alter those choices merely because we used to have no choice.
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No niches. No mass. Just tribes that care in search of those who would join them or amplify them or yes, sell to them.
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This is not utopia, but it is our future." (Moi ici: Quem mais fala sobre o futuro da vida em Mongo?)
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É com estas palavras que Seth Godin termina o livro "We Are All Weird"... um autêntico manifesto em prol de Mongo!!!
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Vejam mais este sintoma do mundo maravilhoso que aí vem (maravilhoso porque será um mundo de oportunidades para os pequenos...):
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"More than just digital quilting"
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Simplesmente, fascinou-me, deixou-me a sonhar... as aplicações escolhidas que tornaram o tablet de um diferente do tablet de outro, saltam do net e misturam-se com a realidade... uma planta que envia uma mensagem via twitter quando tem falta de água...
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"“The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit,” writes Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine.
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It is easy to laugh at the idea that hobbyists with 3D printers will change the world. But the original industrial revolution grew out of piecework done at home, and look what became of the clunky computers of the 1970s. The maker movement is worth watching."

Been there, done that and... moved on

Este postal é para iniciados... e receio confundir os não-iniciados.
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Uma das primeiras questões a colocar, para iniciar uma reflexão estratégica numa empresa é:
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Quem são os clientes-alvo?
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As empresas que não respondem a esta pergunta, ou que não são consequentes com a resposta, tratam os clientes como uma média, a miudagem, um perigoso fantasma estatístico (ver marcadores).
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Não trabalhar para clientes-alvo significa um passaporte para o stuck-in-the-middle, significa incapacidade para actuar num mercado polarizado, ou seja, o fim da linha para essas empresas que são incapazes de se definirem e de escolherem os clientes preferidos.
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Até aqui tudo bem e estou de acordo com Peter Fader "Customer Centricity":
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"Too many people think that being customer centric means doing everything that your customers want, and that's not the case. Being friendly and offering good service are a part of customer centricity, but they are not the whole thing. Customer centricity means that you're going to be friendly, provide good service and develop new products and services for the special focal customers -- the ones who provide a lot of value for you -- but not necessarily for the other ones. You need to pick and choose. Some customers deserve the special treatment, and if others want to buy from you, that's great, but they are not going to be treated the same.
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You are not going to ignore customers. You are not going to fire customers. (Moi ici: Depende, basta recordar as curvas de Stobachoff e os números de Byrnes. Ver marcadores) You are not going to treat them badly, but you will treat some better than others. You are going to be really careful about whom you choose to treat that way and what that treatment means. Does it mean you give those special customers absolutely everything? Maybe not. But you're definitely going to give them more consideration than customers who frankly are not worth that much to you.

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A requirement behind customer centricity is the ability to understand customers at a fairly granular level  (Moi ici: O que chamo: olhar olhos nos olhos, olhar na menina dos olhos dos clientes-alvos) and to be able to identify the customers or the segments of customers who are valuable from the ones who aren't. If you can't sort out your customers -- if you can't look at them and know who is good and who is bad -- then you can't be customer centric. That's step one.
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Step two is having an operational ability as well as an organizational capability to be able to deliver different products and services to different kinds of customers. (Moi ici: Construir, adaptar, um mosaico de actividades auto-reforçadoras. Ver marcadores) That's tough to do.

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Nearly every company on the planet is product centric. You look at their organizational chart, and it's broken up by different kinds of products. You look at the incentives. You look at the language they use. You look at the performance metrics that they rely on. It's all based on different kinds of products. The whole business model is based on producing something or a set of somethings in really high volumes and at really low costs, and that's going to drop to the bottom line. (Moi ici: Recordar aqueles postais recentes: parte I e parte II sobre tudo ser serviço e a co-criação)
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That's more or less business as usual. I'm not suggesting that it's easy, and I'm not suggesting that it's going away tomorrow. But I am suggesting that there are alternatives. If you organize the company around different types of customers and have customer segment managers who are just as powerful as today's product managers are -- giving them the right incentives and the right resources and tools -- that can actually be a more profitable way for many companies to go to market.

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(Moi ici: Now, quite a finale!)

One of the things that surprised me in the book is you say that "the customer" doesn't exist. We've been talking about customers all afternoon. What does that mean? (Moi ici: Recordar os postais do Senhor dos Perdões sobre a tolice da homogeneidade dos mercados)

Fader: One of the things that drives me crazy is when I hear managers or entrepreneurs talking about "the customer," doing back-of-the-envelope calculations about what "the customer" will be worth or discussing how "the customer" will respond to this kind of product or that kind of offer.
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By talking about "the customer" or by talking about "the average customer," that doesn't do justice to the vast heterogeneity and the incredible differences across our customers in terms of their propensity to buy, to talk to each other and to respond to different kinds of offers.

(Moi ici: Agarrem-se às cadeiras, mais um promotor de Mongo) Again, step one of being customer centric is not only acknowledging the heterogeneity, but celebrating it; saying, "Wow, all this heterogeneity is a great thing because it lets us pick and choose different kinds of customers!" (Moi ici: That's the spirit. Mais do que reconhecer e aproveitar a heterogeneidade dos mercados, é celebrá-la, é fazer batota para a aumentar, é assim que se torna a concorrência imperfeita e se criam monopólios de facto) When we say "the customer," we are selling ourselves short. I think it's important to not use those words and to always have a plural there."

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Depois de tudo isto, não posso estar mais de acordo com Fader ... tal como estávamos de acordo com Newton, até que apareceu Einstein... depois de identificarmos os clientes-alvo... descobrimos que isso é, cada vez mais, insuficiente!!! And we moved on.

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Temos de equacionar a cadeia da procura... como aqui relatei em alguns exemplos, uma empresa pode criar um modelo de negócio em que quem paga, o cliente-alvo, não é o foco principal. 

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Para lá da customer-centricity, temos de adoptar a balanced centricity, o many-to-many... (aqui, aqui e aqui)

We Are All Weird - Um manifesto sobre Mongo

Já tenho a versão audio do último livro de Seth Godin "We Are All Weird" que começarei a ler depois de terminada a audição de "Adapt" de Tim Harford.
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"We Are All Weird" é um manifesto sobre Mongo:
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"The mass market — which made average products for average people (Moi ici: Esta doença da média, da miudagem, está a acabar e, isso é uma oportunidade espectacular) — was invented by organizations that needed to keep their factories and systems running efficiently.

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Stop for a second and think about the backwards nature of that sentence.
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The factory came first. It led to the mass market. Not the other way around.

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The typical institution ... just couldn’t afford mass customization, couldn’t afford to make a different product for every user.
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The mass market is efficient (Moi ici: Cá está a minha luta contra os eficientistas, se acaba o mass market acaba a tirania da eficiência) and profitable, and we live in it. It determines not just what we buy, but what we want, how we measure others, how we vote, how we have kids, and how we go to war. It’s all built on this idea that everyone is the same, at least when it comes to marketing.

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Mass wasn’t always here. In 1918, there were two thousand car companies active in the United States. In 1925, the most popular saddle maker in this country probably had .0001% market share. The idea of mass was hardly even a dream for the producer of just about any object. (Moi ici: E vamos convergir novamente para um mundo parecido com esse... variedade, variedade, variedade. PMEs aproveitem a oportunidade!!!)
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At its heyday, on the other hand, Heinz could expect that more than 70 percent of the households in the U.S. had a bottle of their ketchup in the fridge, and Microsoft knew that every single company in the Fortune 500 was using their software, usually on every single personal computer and server in the company.
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Is it any wonder that market-leading organizations fear the weird?

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This is a manifesto about the mass market. About mass politics, mass production, mass retailing, and even mass education.
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The defining idea of the twentieth century, more than any other, was mass. (Moi ici: Uma grande verdade. O mercado de massas foi um blip na história da economia)
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Mass gave us efficiency and productivity, making us (some people) rich. Mass gave us huge nations, giving us (some people) power. Mass allowed powerful people to influence millions, giving us (some people) control.
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And now mass is dying.
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We see it fighting back, clawing to control conversations and commerce and politics. But it will fail; it must. The tide has turned, and mass as the engine of our culture is gone forever.
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That idea may make you uncomfortable. If your work revolves around finding the masses, creating for the masses, or selling to the masses, this change is very threatening. Some of us, though, view it as the opportunity of a lifetime. The end of mass is not the end of the world, but it is a massive change, and this manifesto will help you think through the opportunity it represents." (Moi ici: Esta é uma das missões-chave deste blogue. Despertar as empresas para o mundo de possibilidades que se abrem com o fim do mass market, com o triunfo de Mongo)

Procura - a chave

Qual é a grande escassez dos tempos que correm?
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A de clientes!!!
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Há um excesso de oferta face à procura. Por isso, no meu trabalho aponto a atenção das empresas para os clientes-alvo, para a cadeia da procura, para a "balanced centricity".
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O segredo está na procura, o segredo está na eficácia, esqueçam tudo o resto.
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Teppo Hudson faz um resumo brilhante das ideias de Steve Blank sobre o tema:
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"many startups fail because they found no customers. Not because they could not deliver what the technical feature set failed. The startups just ended up building "a house where nobody wanted to live". So like the fighter pilots in "Top Gun", the startup founders have to move fast with limited resources. They have to do decision calls with limited amount of data. Essentially the thrills come through those decisions made blindly (Moi ici: BTW, grande título: "You can never size a market in Excel"), with gut feelings. Just remember, your gut feeling will only emerge by talking to the customers and developing from there."
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Encomendado desde 3 de Julho último, aguardo com interesse o último livro de Slywotzky (um autor que respeito muito, mas respeito mesmo muito), "Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It".
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Aqui no blogue, e nas empresas, chamamos a atenção para os clientes-alvo, avisamos que os retratos estatísticos dos mercados não existem, ilustram fantasmas (e aqui e lembram-se da miudagem?):
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"6. "De-Average" the Customer "One size fits all" is an idea that great demand creators have discarded--because it doesn't work. Instead, they "de-average" complex markets, recognizing that the "average customer" is a myth, and that different customers (and even the same customers at different times) have widely varying hassle maps. The magic is not just in segmenting by hassle map, but in providing highly efficient, cost-effective ways to create product variations that more perfectly match the varying needs of customers."
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E quando o fazem... o preço fica para segundo plano, deixa de ser um order-winner e passa a ser um order-qualifier. E a charada fica respondida, e a importância do preço fica realmente over-rated.
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Quem o faz deixa de eleger o custo como a principal preocupação e concentra-se no valor que os clientes sentirão a emergir na sua vida durante o uso.
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Por exemplo, quanto mais uso a minha mochila Monte Campo... mais percebo como está bem feita, como tem soluções para problemas que sempre tive com outras, como, por exemplo, o suor nas costas.

Não confundir a realidade com o mapa da realidade (parte III)

Continuado daqui e daqui.

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A revista Harvard Business Review de Junho de 2010 inclui o artigo "You Are What You Measure" onde se chama a atenção para algumas consequências do uso dos indicadores.

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"CEOs care about stock value because that’s how we measure them. If we want to change what they care about, we should change what we measure.

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Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. What you measure is what you’ll get. Period.
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This phenomenon happens at an organizational level, too. States that use standardized education assessment tests produce kids who indeed perform well on these tests but falter when asked to demonstrate their knowledge of the same material in a different way.
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To change CEOs’ behavior, we need to change the numbers we measure. Stock value metrics that focus on the long term are a start, but even more important are new numbers that direct leaders’ attention to the real drivers of sustainable success."

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Por exemplo, se é importante, para uma empresa, o indicador "Nº de horas de formação por colaborador", podemos chegar ao limite da empresa dar formação de treta sobre temas de treta e contribuir para um bom desempenho do indicador.

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Se o PIB é igual a:

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Consumo + Investimento + Gastos do Estado + (Exportações - Importações)

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Se o consumo cai, se o investimento cai, se as exportações caem e se as importações caem. Então, se os gastos do Estado subirem e se o Estado investir em projectos sem retorno... milagre, o PIB sobe!!!

Não confundir a realidade com o mapa da realidade (parte II)

Continuado daqui:

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Rotunda

View more presentations from ccruz1234.

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Continua.

Não confundir a realidade com o mapa da realidade

Hoje, antes do meu jogging matinal, li este artigo de Daniel Amaral no jornal do regime "A mudança".

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Tive o cuidado de levar a máquina fotográfica para, durante a corrida, ilustrar o que vejo todos os dias.

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Os indicadores são importantes ponto. Os indicadores são muito importantes ponto. No entanto, os indicadores não são a realidade... e os humanos, quando aprendem o truque são muito bons a engenheirar resultados para os indicadores.

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Continua

Scary stuff ou fantasmas estatísticos?

"Salários em Portugal têm o maior aumento da década" vs "Two-thirds facing a pay cut or freeze"
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Something is wrong here!!!!