"O ministro das Finanças argumenta que os mercados validam a sua estratégia."Entretanto, esta semana já li:
"The circular economy uses understanding the system to give a better overall result. You can’t ignore the feedback, it’s real. Just because it is not in your model or idea – doesn’t take away the issue. So, systems thinking really is understanding bigger contexts over longer periods and looking at the connections, not the parts, for insights. We are looking for patterns not certainty, because certainty does not exist, but the pattern gives us insight about which direction to move in. A circular economy reflects this more contemporary scientific understanding of how the world works.
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Lou: So how can people know where to start when it comes to systems thinking? How do we break free from habitual thinking and take things forward?
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Ken: This indirect causation makes it difficult to know where to intervene in the system, because people expect visible action. They are used to reacting to cause and effect. Having a different perspective on how the world works doesn’t sound like taking action"
"When companies evolve at a rapid pace, often people cannot keep up. Some individuals who fit our company in its infancy became a weaker fit over time. They may have had difficulty keeping up with our company’s growth rate and the requirements of their evolving roles.O trecho que se segue faz-me recordar o caso concreto de uma empresa que recusava retirar um trabalhador que gerava reclamações, por causa de defeitos no produto em que tocava, porque não tinha posto alternativo para o colocar e não o queria despedir por causa da lealdade mostrada ao longo dos anos:
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Often, I doubled down on an untenable position to keep an employee on because I didn’t understand how much harm the wrong fit could cause — especially when a person had been with us for so long."
"People and the needs they fulfill evolve constantly, especially in small companies that grow very quickly. A good fit isn’t just about putting the right person in the right seat, but about putting them there at the right time.Postura louvável em termos humanos, por parte da gerência, mas depois não me venham falar de produtividade baixa.
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One of the things that separates good leaders from great ones is the ability to recognize when those three factors are out of alignment and to act upon that information, particularly in the case of a loyal, long-term employee."
@ccz1, troca tweets de 2015, não sei até que ponto esta desorientação actual na Ryanair não tenha surgido precisamente do tal DNA que refere https://t.co/wseCWNgQw3— highalpha (@veryhighalpha) September 19, 2017
"Any efficiency measure applied relentlessly ultimately becomes inefficient."Hoje, apanho estes textos de Seth Godin:
"As a valuable contributor seeking to build a career, you benefit when you develop a unique asset, because that asset gives you the leverage to choose a niche in a system that respects optimization instead."
"Many companies do a good job of analyzing and planning for competitive risks, such as new market entrants or the threat of substitution, but they give only pro forma attention to noncompetitive uncertainties, including cybersecurity, natural disasters, and geopolitical risk—even though the impact of these events can be immediate and catastrophic. And herein lies the proverbial problem and opportunity. The problem for companies—and sometimes also economies and societies—is what to do and how to react when things go awry (as they inevitably will) and there is no plan in place."A importância do contexto. Agora imaginem quando uma empresa é liderada por fragilistas... olha! Veio-me à mente a recordação do "He puffed, and puffed and puffed one last time."
"Fragile systems collapse under stress. The opposite of fragile is robust – a system unaffected by stress. Robust systems do not improve. Antifragile systems gain from stress. Antifragile is a neologism coined by Taleb. Nature is antifragile. Hormesis, the long terms gains of the body from small stressors, is a recognized biological phenomenon which illustrates antifragility. The stresses in antifragile systems are like a live attenuated vaccine which protects the body from its more virulent counterpart.Trechos retirados de "Why Doctors should read books by Nassim Taleb"
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Black swan events can’t be predicted. But systems can be made less prone to outliers. According to Taleb, we should focus on pay-offs, not probabilities; exposure, not risk; mitigation, not prediction. Antifragile is Taleb’s peace offering – an epistemological middle ground where the unknowable compromises with our need to act. The fault lies not in our failure to predict Tsunamis, but in failing to make systems Tsunami proof."
"SYSTEMS LEARN BY REMOVING.Ao mesmo tempo que lia estas linhas imediatamente recordei e fiz a ponte para este postal, ""Nations do not trade; it is firms that trade"", de Novembro de 2007 e estas frases:
Now, if you are going to highlight a single section from this book, here is the one. The interventionista case is central to our story because it shows how absence of skin in the game has both ethical and epistemological effects (i.e., related to knowledge).
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Returning to our interventionistas, we saw that people don’t learn so much from their –and other people’s –mistakes; rather it is the system that learns by selecting those less prone to a certain type of mistakes and eliminating others.
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Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.
Many bad pilots, as we mentioned, are currently in the bottom of the Atlantic, many dangerous bad drivers in the local quiet cemetery thanks to skin in the game – so transportation didn’t get safer just because people learn from errors, but because the system does. The experience of the system is different from that of an individual and requires such a filtering. This remains the central point about disincentives that has been missed so far."
"It is widely believed that restructuring has boosted productivity by displacing low-skilled workers and creating jobs for the high skilled.
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In essence, creative destruction means that low productivity plants are displaced by high productivity plants.[Moi ici: A produtividade aumenta by removing parts, via negativa]
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As creative destruction is shown to be an important element of economic growth, there is definitely a case for public policy to support this process, or at least avoid disturbing it without good reason.
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Competition in product markets is important. Subsidies, on the other hand, may insulate low productivity plants and firms from healthy market selection, and curb incentives for improving their productivity performance. Business failures, plant shutdowns and layoffs are the unavoidable byproducts of economic development."
"Cada minuto que o ministro lá está é um minuto a menos em que estou disponível para os clientes e potenciais clientes e, é um minuto a mais em que me afugenta do stand potenciais clientes por causa da entourage."
"Profit buys you time and flexibility. Profit is the ultimate flexibility because it buys you the ultimate luxury: time. As long as you remain profitable, you can go in any direction you want and take as much time as you need.
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Profit is the ultimate shield against bullshit. When you’re profitable you don’t have to play games, succumb to substitutional metrics, cross your fingers, or grovel for other people’s money, validation, or acceptance. You simply make more money than you spend — and run a fundamentally sound, economics 101 business. When profit’s a requirement, it becomes a lot harder to step in the bullshit.
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$1 in profit is the ultimate FU money. ... all you need is $1 in annual profit. Because once your company is self-sustaining and profitable, and you don’t owe anyone anything (in my book, if you owe money you aren’t truly profitable), then you can say FU to just about anything. You don’t need to do anything you don’t want to do when you don’t have to rely on anyone else to be sustainable. You don’t have to dance on anyone else’s stage, or play by anyone else’s rules. FU money isn’t about buying an island, it’s about being an island — your own sustainable entity.
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[Moi ici: O trecho que se segue é um aparte acerca do problema do fragilismo. O fragilismo coloca-nos sempre no fio da navalha, sem margem de manobra] Profits provide insulation. When tastes change, when trends shift, when the markets flutter, funding freezes up. That happens whether your particular business is unaffected or not. And you might well be caught out in the cold and freeze to death. Remember 2008? 2009? The nuclear winters of funding? Those were some of our best years! Profits insulated us from jittery investors, and our customers still kept paying for Basecamp."
"One of the problems of the interventionista –wanting to get involved in other people’s affairs “in order to help”, while genuinely wanting to do good, results in disrupting some of the peace-making mechanisms that are inherent in human’s affairs, a combination of collaboration and strategic hostility. As we saw in the prologue, the error continues because someone else is paying the price.
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People on the ground, those with skin in the game are not too interested in geopolitics or grand abstract principles, but rather in having bread on the table, beer (or, for some, nonalcoholic beverages such as yoghurt drinks) in the refrigerator, and good weather at outdoors family picnics."
"the person who can't stop playing the short game... well, he realizes that it's all sort of a house of cards, and often indulges in the urge to freak out, disgorging panic and fear and even hatred on the person that's easy to blame.
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The thing is, thin ice doesn't give you a lot of leverage, and thin ice can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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The first step for the agent, the middle manager, the hanger-on is to invest in the long term, to find an arc that actually builds an asset that lasts.
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And the second is to act 'as if'. All that panic doesn't pay off. It merely makes it more likely that the people you need to earn trust with will do precisely the opposite."
— Kevin Dulle (@IdeaFreak) April 4, 2017
""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."
"Simply, my collaborators and I managed to define fragility as sensitivity to disorderTrechos retirados de "An Expert Called Lindy"
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(More technically, being fragile, it necessarily has a nonlinear reaction to stressors: up until its breaking point, shocks of larger intensity affect it disproportionally more than smaller ones).
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Is fragile what has an asymmetric response to volatility and other stressors, that is, will experience more harm than benefit from it.
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the operation of time is necessarily done through skin in the game. Without skin in the game, via contact with reality, the mechanism of fragility is disrupted: things may survive for no reason for a while, then ultimately collapse causing a lot of side harm.
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Overconfidence: Fiducia pecunias amici “I lost money because of my excessive confidence”, Erasmus citing Theognis, Epicharmus"
"Adaptation here has a more specific meaning than the usual Darwinian picture of an organism well-equipped for survival. One difficulty with the Darwinian view is that there’s no way of defining a well-adapted organism except in retrospect. The “fittest” are those that turned out to be better at survival and replication, but you can’t predict what fitness entails. Whales and plankton are well-adapted to marine life, but in ways that bear little obvious relation to one another.A fazer recordar as simulações de Lindgren que aprendi com Beinhocker, as estratégias nunca são eternas e são contextuais. E a fazer recordar os não-fragilistas, aqueles que se preparam para o pior. E a segunda lição da teoria dos jogos:
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England’s definition of “adaptation” is closer to Schrödinger’s, and indeed to Maxwell’s: A well-adapted entity can absorb energy efficiently from an unpredictable, fluctuating environment. It is like the person who keeps his footing on a pitching ship while others fall over because she’s better at adjusting to the fluctuations of the deck. Using the concepts and methods of statistical mechanics in a nonequilibrium setting, England and his colleagues argue that these well-adapted systems are the ones that absorb and dissipate the energy of the environment, generating entropy in the process."
"Lesson #2: Rational choice, chosing a dominant strategy, can lead to outcomes that suck,"
"Leaders who want to shake things up have to be comfortable with the idea that “failure is an option,” Doyle concludes. In a world of hyper-competition and nonstop disruption, playing it safe is the riskiest course of all. That’s a recipe for reinvention that makes for good pizza and big change."Como não recordar o delírio dos fragilistas e o aviso de Alicia Juarrero: o fail safe é impossível logo, optar pelo safe fail.
2009 é o novo 2016. Esta manhã em Estarreja, caixas multibanco do Novo Banco e da CGD sem dinheiro, pelas 12h— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) December 23, 2016
"Saúdam-se as despesas, as reposições, as reversões, e ai de quem venha falar de endividamento, uma pessoa do passado que não sabe que austeridade e dívida são assuntos que não entusiasmam. Pelo contrário, o melhor é entrar no jogo e prometer mais ainda, fazendo dos restantes uns contabilistas que só querem saber de contas e não das pessoas."Só teremos o que merecemos
"Disruptors should know better than anyone that we are all vulnerable to being disrupted ourselves, and often faster than we imagine possible. Everybody needs an Act II and maybe Act III and beyond.
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often we need to be moving on to Plan B while Plan A is still in full hyper-growth swing. By the time another disruptor actually arrives at the door of our dream house, if we haven’t already have moved on to conquer new territory we will be trapped.
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the time to formulate, and even launch, Plan B is before we need it. If we wait until growth slows or stagnation sets in or the future is beating down the doors, we’re in danger of being left behind. It’s while the First Act is in full swing, well before the curtain falls that Act II needs to be donning its costumes and lining up the props."
"Cartaz da campanha de Trump em plena cidade de Bragança."Porque recordo isto?
"Over time, societies that allow creative destruction to operate grow more productive and richer; their citizens see the benefits of new and better products, shorter work weeks, better jobs, and higher living standards.Interessante este exemplo "Oreo Plant Moves to Mexico… Federal Subsidies to Blame?"
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Herein lies the paradox of progress. A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever. At the same time, attempts to soften the harsher aspects of creative destruction by trying to preserve jobs or protect industries will lead to stagnation and decline, short-circuiting the march of progress. Schumpeter’s enduring term reminds us that capitalism’s pain and gain are inextricably linked. The process of creating new industries does not go forward without sweeping away the preexisting order.
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Through this constant roiling of the status quo, creative destruction provides a powerful force for making societies wealthier. It does so by making scarce resources more productive.
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Attempts to save jobs almost always backfire. Instead of going out of business, inefficient producers hang on, at a high cost to consumers or taxpayers. The tinkering shortcircuits market signals that shift resources to emerging industries. It saps the incentives to introduce new products and production methods, leading to stagnation, layoffs, and bankruptcies. The ironic point of Schumpeter’s iconic phrase is this: societies that try to reap the gain of creative destruction without the pain find themselves enduring the pain but not the gain."
