A paisagem pode ser modificada pelas empresas

Demasiadas vezes olhamos para a paisagem competitiva como uma constante do desafio.
Na verdade, a paisagem competitiva não é um dado constante. Ela está sempre a mudar. Ainda ontem a notícia sobre a taxa de 25% que os EUA vão aplicar sobre as importações de queijo e fruta, representa uma alteração da paisagem imposta por agentes muito poderosos.
O que esquecemos muitas vezes é que as próprias empresa podem agir, elas próprias, para alterar a paisagem competitiva onde actuam.

"For purposes of understanding shaping in strategy, the idea that organisms can alter their selection environments and those of their descendants has obvious appeal.
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In biology, organisms shape elements of the selection environment that affect survival. But in strategy, firms generally have a different proximate goal—they seek profits—and they take action directed toward this goal. Thus, for firms, the relevant selection criteria are those that determine profits and payoffs to specific courses of action.We can think of the selection criteria for profit-seeking firms as encoded in the payoff structure that maps particular firm actions or decisions or attributes (e.g., activities, resources, and capabilities) to the payoffs that ensue. In this sense, shaping the selection environment in strategy means shaping the payoff structure for all firms operating in that environment. In NK terms, firms generate or modify the “fitness function,” which lies behind the topology of the fitness landscape that all firms climb in search of profit opportunities. Similarly, in the context of strategic interactions, shaping the business context means that a firm or firms playing a competitive game endogenously generate or modify the payoff structure for all firms in the game, such as by altering the payoffs to particular moves or the types of moves available.
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1. Shaping can have major direct effects on the performance of a shaper and its position on the business landscape, i.e., its competitive advantage.
2. As a corollary, shaping can also have direct implications for the competitive advantage of competitors. In addition to improving the focal firm’s position, shaping can directly undermine other firms’ positions on the landscape by affecting the bases of their competitive advantage.
3. Highly malleable business landscapes may hide subtle dangers for shapers because high malleability leads to more frequent shaping. Although firms may be individually rational when shaping the business context in an effort to improve their performance, their independent actions may collectively lead to overshaping and long-run instability in performance for all firms.
4. Overshaping is not independent of the number of firms of the shaping type in the population. Unless shaping involves joint action by a group of firms (a case that the model does not contemplate), ceteris paribus the fewer the number of shapers, the greater the benefits from shaping activity.
5. The sustainability of competitive advantage is likely to be highest in situations of moderate to high complexity (K) combined with a low to moderate number of dimensions available for shaping (E). Under these conditions, any advantage obtained through shaping is less likely to be undermined by shaping on the part of other firms and is more likely to be sustained due to complexity."

Trechos retirados de "Searching, Shaping, and the Quest for Superior Performance" de Giovanni Gavetti, Constance E. Helfat e Luigi Marengo, publico por Strategy Science, Volume 2, Issue 3, September 2017, Pages ii, 141-209

"Opportunities are not just out there, ready to be plucked"

Part I.

"Behavioral failures are impediments to firms’ abilities to compete for opportunities. Such failures are behavioral insofar as these impediments are mental in origin. Behavioral failures can be viewed in terms of limits to strategic leaders’ abilities to manage and overcome such mental impediments.
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These failures revolve around three key dimensions: rationality, plasticity, and shaping ability.
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Rationality. Strategic opportunities must reflect asymmetries between prices and the rent-generating potential of some of their constituent elements. The first necessary condition for eliminating such discrepancies is that competing economic agents have the ability to spot all undervalued courses of action. This condition requires that competing agents can identify all possible courses of action and accurately evaluate them. If this condition is not met, untapped opportunities can remain ignored by firms, even if competition is intense. Because of the resulting lack of competition for these opportunities, the market prices for some of their constituent elements will not converge to their true values.
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economic agents are generally myopic; they are more reliable and effective at identifying and predicting the outcomes of courses of action that lie in the neighborhood of their firm’s current activities than they are at finding and estimating outcomes of more distant ones.
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distant foresight is not impossible, but it involves mental processes that are more difficult to perform reliably.
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Plasticity. Full rationality is necessary but not sufficient to negate opportunities. Competing firms might be fully rational and know where superior opportunities lie, but they might also be inert and thus unable to act on and compete for such opportunities. In landscape terms, agents could know the entire landscape and decide to act on a specific opportunity, but their firm might unexpectedly get stuck on its way to the peak because of bounded plasticity, with dire effects on its survival prospects. In this case, when identifying a superior opportunity does not translate or translates only partially into competitive behavior, the discrepancies between elements’ current and true values would remain or be eliminated only after major time lags. The theoretical condition for superior opportunities to be absent must therefore also encompass a lack of bounds in firms’ plasticity.
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It was argued that most local opportunities are noticed. Even if inertial forces prevent some firms from acting on such opportunities, the fact that many profitseeking players spot and decide to pursue the same or similar opportunities attenuates, in the aggregate, these forces’ impact on competition for them. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that incremental changes typically face less resistance than long jumps do. Consequently, existing opportunities tend to be distant.
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Accordingly, if valuable opportunities are hard to find within firms’ current basins of attraction, firms will have to adopt novel representations in order to pursue them. To the extent that the strategic representation is well established and central to the firm’s identity, that firm’s pursuit of the novel opportunity will likely violate some elements of its own identity. This pursuit is problematic. Identity-violating changes are typically destabilizing and associated with high mortality rates because they generally trigger cultural opposition or asperity, especially when central identity codes are infused with moral value, have an emotional component,
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“If a leader tries to march toward strange destinations, the organization is likely to deflect the effort.”
Here, “strange” can be interpreted as violating taken-for granted identity codes.
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In addition, identity violations imply complex changes. Firms’ strategic representations are at the core of what firms do. Violating them usually sets off cascades of changes that generally require firms both to acquire new capabilities at the subsystem level, which is difficult, and to change the architecture governing said subsystems, which poses more challenges.
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Shaping Ability. Full rationality and full plasticity together are still not sufficient to negate the existence of opportunities. Competing firms might be fully rational and fully plastic but substantially bounded in their ability to legitimize new courses of action. Even if the identification of a superior opportunity translates into competitive behavior, firms’ inability to legitimize it means that discrepancies between some of the current values of its elements and their potential values are preserved.
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Opportunities are not just out there, ready to be plucked. Courses of action that can be superior often require proactive efforts to shape selection criteria for their potential to be expressed.
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To meet the condition of unbounded shaping ability, a firm must have unbounded ability to shape the sociocognitive processes that persuade multiple parties (which are only partially known) that a particular conception or course of action is viable. It is implausible that this requirement is met fully, particularly if the new course of action is significantly cognitively distant from the status quo, and it is thus more likely to challenge beliefs about what is legitimate in a given context. There is strong evidence that institutional actors such as financial analysts tend to delegitimize courses of action that are especially distant from the cognitive status quo, and firms that meet such resistance tend to shy away from their intent to implement these initiatives. Stated differently, when the pursuit of cognitively distant opportunities is at stake, the average firm fails to persuade external audiences."

Trechos retirados de "Toward a Behavioral Theory of Strategy" de Giovanni Gavetti, publicado por Organization Science - Vol. 23, No. 1, January–February 2012, pp. 267–285

De onde vêm as grandes estratégias (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

"Great strategies should be both impactful and innovative. But where do such strategic innovations come from?"

Interessante como a mesma pergunta é colocada por mais três autores, depois de olharmos para a proposta de Gavetti.

"The question of where great strategies comes from has many answers, and there are theories and anecdotal “origin stories” to support each of them. But there is a fundamental tension between answers that emphasize favorable outcomes under conditions of uncertainty and those that assert intentionality (see Figure 1).

First, there is a basket of different kinds of components that grows with time as new components are added to it. Second, there is a prespecified set of valid and invalid combinations of these components, with the valid combinations representing viable products. We assume that the firm knows which combinations of the components already in its basket, as well as combinations from the existing basket with any single new component under consideration for adoption, constitute viable products. But, crucially, we assume no knowledge of the “recipe book” beyond this—that is, we do not know whether or not combinations containing multiple components outside of our basket are viable.
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The firm’s goal is to maximize the number of products that it can make—its product space—as it adds more components to its basket. The model does not consider the different values associated with specific products, which will depend on the market environment and may change over time. Instead, it simply seeks to maximize the number of viable products that it can make,
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we introduce two simple variables: the complexity of products and the usefulness of components.
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To make a product of complexity c, we must possess all c of its distinct components. So making a complex product is harder than making a simple one, because there are more ways that we might be missing a needed component.
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Components that tend to show up in complex products do not seem useful early on, because we are likely to be missing other components that those products require.[Moi ici: Aqui as coisas começam a aquecer. Como não recordar que os macacos não voam, de Ricardo Hausmann]
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Our research shows that the most important components—materials, skills, and routines—when an organization is less developed tend to be different from when it is more developed. The relative usefulness of components changes over time [Moi ici: Como não recordar os que acreditam que basta importar/copiar o que se faz noutros países. Como não recordar a rejeição do Relatório Porter]
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A key insight from the analysis is that there are different frames of reference for prioritizing a set of components. The most useful components in one frame, or innovation stage, need not be the same as in another. No single frame is inherently more valid than any other; the frame we prioritize depends on our current stage and how far into the future we wish to and are able to look.
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Internally, the optimal strategy depends on resource constraints and, more broadly, the objectives of the firm, which are related to its governance. Resource-constrained firms tend to favor an impatient strategy and immediately reap the value of new components, whereas wealthier firms likely favor a farsighted strat-egy and, after a stagnant period assembling needed components, expect to achieve greater growth as the value of those components kicks in.[Moi ici: Como não relacionar isto com "Carlos Costa: “Empresas portuguesas estão entre as mais alavancadas da Europa”]"
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Third, our analysis stresses the importance of trade-offs, but with a clearly dynamic twist. ... The distinction between impatient and farsighted strategies more closely resembles the distinction in evolutionary biology between r-selection (more offspring) and K-selection (better offspring). The r-selection approach, similar to our impatient strategy, invests little in nurturing individual progeny, focusing instead on fast, immediate growth.
Fourth, our analysis fits with recent academic and practical work on strategy dynamics emphasizing the importance of both irreversibility and uncertainty for dynamic thinking about strategy to really be required. ... without irreversibility of any sort, choices could be reversed costlessly and therefore be made myopically, without penalty.
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what matter are the components that are available at a point in time rather than the order in which they were acquired.
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Our main insight is that the most important objects, skills, and routines are not static but depend on how far along the innovation process a firm has progressed."

Trechos retirados de "Searching for Great Strategies" de Thomas Fink, Pankaj Ghemawat e Martin Reeves, publicado por Strategy Science Vol. 2, No. 4, December 2017, pp. 272–281