Uma estratégia nunca é eterna

Eric Beinhocker no seu "The Origin of Wealth" escreveu:
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“Likewise, we cannot say any single strategy in the Prisioner’s Dilemma ecology was a winner. .
Lindgren’s model showed that once in a while, a particular strategy would rise up, dominate the game for a while, have its day in the sun, and then inevitably be brought down by some innovative competitor. Sometimes, several strategies shared the limelight, battling for “market share” control of the game board, and then an outsider would come in and bring them all down. During other periods, two strategies working as a symbiotic pair would rise up together – but then if one got into trouble, both collapsed.”
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“We discovered that there is no one best strategy; rather, the evolutionary process creates an ecosystem of strategies – an ecosystem that changes over time in Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.”
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Lembrei-me deste trecho a propósito deste artigo do jornal Telegraph "Fresh and Wild closes store as consumers reject organic for cheaper deals"
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Quem são os clientes-alvo? Qual é o seu comportamento? Rejeitam a "organic food" por questões de orçamento ou encontram essa "organic food" em fornecedores alternativos?
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Aquilo que era verdade ontem, amanhã deixa de fazer sentido.
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No livro "Creative Destruction - Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them", Richard Foster e Sarah Kaplan descrevem o mercado desta forma:
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"Markets... lacking culture, leadership, and emotions, do not experience the bursts of desperation, depression, denial, and hope that corporations face. The market has no lingering memories or remorse. It has no mental models, or dilution. It simply waits for the forces at play to work out - for new companies to be created and for acquisitions to clear the field. The markets silently allow weaker companies to be put up for sale and leaves it to the new owners to shap them up or shut them down.
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Lacking production-oriented control systems, markets create more surprise and innovation than do corporations. They operate on the assumption of discontinuity, and accommodate continuity. Corporations, on the other hand, assume continuity and attempt to accommodate discontinuity. The difference is profound."
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Por isso é que as estratégias intuitivas, baseadas no preço-baixo que resultaram tão bem na década de 80 e na primeira metade da década de 90 do século passado, falharam clamorosamente quando o mundo mudou, com a abertura da economia na Europa de Leste e com a adesão da China à organização mundial do comércio.
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Não há estratégias eternas.

Modelos mentais e mudança

Gosto muito da metáfora do iceberg (de Peter Senge), para ilustrar o encadeamento de uma série de factores que explicam o que vem à tona nos relatórios periódicos das organizações.

Os resultados esporádicos podem ser colocados num gráfico que ilustre a evolução temporal e retrate um padrão de comportamento.

Os padrões de comportamento resultam de estruturas sistémicas, redes entrelaçadas de relações de causa-efeito.
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Essas estruturas sistémicas, por sua vez, resultam de modelos mentais que transportamos, muitas vezes de forma inconsciente, e que influenciam a nossa forma de pensar e actuar.
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Encontrei no livro "Creative Destruction - Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them" de Richard Foster e Sarah Kaplan uma boa descrição do que são esses modelos mentais, por que são precisos e por que são perigosos.
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São estes mesmos modelos mentais que explicam por que é tão difícil mudar as organizações, por que é tantas empresas não vêem, não presssentem a chegada do futuro e permanecem demasiado tempo agarradas a modelos de negócio que passaram o seu prazo de validade.
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“Cultural lock-in” – the inability to change the corporate culture even in the face of clear market threats – explains why corporations find it difficult to respond to the messages of the marketplace. Cultural lock-in results from the gradual stiffening of the invisible architecture of the corporation, and the ossification of its decision-making abilities, control systems, and mental models. It dampens a company’s ability to innovate or to shed operations with a less-exciting future. Moreover, it signals the corporation’s inexorable decline into inferior performance.”
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“The heart of the problem is the formation of hidden sets of rules, or mental models, that once formed are extremely difficult to change. Mental models are the core concepts of the corporation, the beliefs and assumptions, the cause-and-effect relationships, the guidelines for interpreting language and signals, the stories repeated within the corporate walls.”
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““… mental models the “theoretical frameworks that help investors better understand the world.”
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"Mental models are invisible in the corporation. They are neither explicit nor examined, but they are pervasive. When well crafted, mental models allow management to anticipate the future and solve problems. But once constructed, mental models become self-reinforcing, self-sustaining, and self-limiting. And when mental models are out of sync with reality, they cause management to make forecasting errors and poor decisions. The assumption of continuity, in fact, is precisely the kind of disconnect with reality that leads corporations into flawed forecasting and poor decisions.”