Em "
A Brief History of the Ways Companies Compete" Favaro faz um breve resumo da evolução dos grandes vectores de competição desde a Revolução Industrial:
"Since the late nineteenth century, we have seen five distinct movements in the way companies compete. The first was efficiency. This was the original purpose of forming corporations — to facilitate the production of products and services with the least amount of wasted time, materials, and labor. The attempt to turn business into a science of efficiency, also known as “Taylorism,” marked the high point of this movement. Many companies still compete this way and there continue to be successors to Taylorism, including business process reengineering and lean production.[Moi ici: Por favor, não me acusem de denegrir o "lean production", o "lean production" pode ser bom ou mau, como a caneta, mais aqui]
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The second movement was scale, a close cousin of efficiency. This is where companies exploit economies of scale that yield lower unit costs and enable sharper pricing of their goods and services.
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Scale and efficiency are mostly about competing by lowering costs. In the early 1980s, a new way of competing broke on to the world stage: the quality movement, with the deification of W. Edwards Deming, who introduced quality as a way of life for Japanese companies.
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Today quality, efficiency, and scale stand side-by-side as ways of competing. For every Wal-Mart and Ford that competes mostly on price, there’s a Nordstrom and BMW that competes mostly on quality. [Moi ici: Não posso concordar com Favaro. Favaro confunde qualidade como "ausência de defeitos" com qualidade como "algo com mais atributos". Não se pode dizer que a Nordstrom tem mais qualidade que a Wal-Mart se o conceito for a ausência de defeitos, assim como se pode dizer que o BMW tem mais qualidade que o Fiat se estivermos a falar na quantidade de atributos. Assim, a qualidade à la Deming, incluiria como mais uma ferramenta de redução de custos. Aliás, essa é a grande crítica que faço ao movimento da Qualidade, o ter cristalizado há muito no chão da fábrica, o ter ficado seduzida pela variabilidade, quando, o que conta cada vez mais é a variedade, daí o fim da marca Redsigma.]
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But after the rise of Japan proved not to be a miracle after all, and with the rise of the internet, a new, fourth movement was born in the 1990s: the network way of competing. Instead of winning customers based on cost or quality (or both), companies began to compete based on how many people (or businesses) use them. [Moi ici: Aquilo que Kaplan me ensinou a designar por estratégias lock-in]
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Today, the network movement has given way to a fifth: the so-called ecosystem way of competing. This an approach of co-opting third parties to build on and leverage your products and services such that they have more total utility to your customers. Your advantage comes not so much from the number of customers you have as from the number of partners you have working with or on top of your products and services."
Depois, Favaro termina a olhar para o futuro:
"All the above begs a question: Will we see any new ways of competing become a sixth movement in the corporate world? [Moi ici: E dá algumas ideias: Agility, disruption, data analytics, integration]
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Whether any of these become a full-blown movement or not, it’s clear that there’s a much bigger menu of ways to compete today compared to a century ago. That’s a good indication of how complex competing in the business world has become."
Este final fez-me logo pensar no paralelismo entre biologia e economia e, daí, chegar a "
Mais estratégias, mais valor acrescentado, mais nichos, mais diversidade" e aos seus gráficos. E daí chegar a "
Rethinking extinction":
"The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue."
Como não pensar em Feyrabend, quando se trata da sobrevivência, aprendemos com MacGyver, "anything goes":
"‘Genes are jumping around. Molecular genetics is finding that hybridisation between species is more common than previously suspected. Darwin talked about a tree of life, with species branching out and separating. But we are discovering it is more of a network, with genes moving between close branches as related species interbreed. This hybridisation quickly opens up evolutionary opportunities.
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Move, adapt or die. When organisms challenged by climate change respond by adapting, they evolve. When they move, they often encounter distant cousins and hybridise with them, sometimes evolving new species.
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Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it."
Em próximo postal voltarei a Favaro e à minha reflexão pessoal sobre a evolução da estratégia.
