Na companhia de Siegfried e Parsifal

Jeremy Gutsche em "Exploiting Chaos" escreve:

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"Accept that the world never returns to normal.

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Successful innovators do not get caught up in the turmoil of change. They don't wait for the world to return to normal. Impervious to the clutter that surrounds them, these vanguards adapt to opportunity.

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The only things slowing you down are the rules you need to break.

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The pursuit of opportunity will require you to think differently and break the rules that paralyze change."

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Durante a minha última audição de "Gut feelings" de Gerd Gigerenzer fixei isto:

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"Imitation can pay in a stable environment. How should a son run his father’s company? When the business world in which the company operates is relatively stable, the son may be well advised to imitate the successful father, rather than starting from scratch by introducing new policies with unknown consequences.

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When is imitation futile? As mentioned before, when the world is quickly changing, imitation can be inferior to individual learning. Consider once again the son who inherits his father’s firm and copies his successful practices, which have made a fortune over decades. Yet when the environment changes quickly, as in the globalization of the market, the formerly winning strategy can cause bankruptcy. In general, imitating traditional practice tends to be successful when changes are slow, and futile when changes are fast."

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Ambos os autores chamam a atenção para, em pleno caos, em plena turbulência, arriscar e quebrar as regras que impedem a adaptação a novas oportunidades. 

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E dei comigo a pensar nos gerentes com a 6ª classe que fazem o que Daniel Bessa e a galeria de encalhados da tríade dizem que é impossível, competir com sucesso num mundo globalizado, apesar de terem o marco alemão como moeda. Os que não conhecem as regras... alteram as regras!!! Os que não conhecem as regras... criam novas regras!!! E, de repente, encontro a harmonia e sintonia com Gigerenzer:

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"The power of ignorance to speed up social change is a common plot in literature. Among the many heroes in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Siegfried is the most clueless one. Siegfried grows up without parental care. He is the naive hero who acts impulsively, whose adventures happen to him, rather than being deliberately planned. Siegfried’s combination of ignorance and fearlessness is the weapon that eventually brings down the rule of the Gods. Similar to Siegfried is Parsifal, the hero of Wagner’s last work. Brought up by his mother in a lonely forest, he knows nothing about the world when he begins his quest for the Holy Grail. The strength of Siegfried, Parsifal, and similar characters lies in their not knowing the laws that rule the social world. ... Ignorance of the status quo, and so a lack of respect for it, is a great weapon with which to revolutionize the social order. These heroes’ intuitive actions were based on missing knowledge, but the gut feeling “I can do it!” can succeed even when based on false information."

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Hoje, encontro este texto "Why Best Buy is Going out of Business...Gradually" (BTW, ao lê-lo, pensem na reacção do comércio tradicional à chegada das grandes superfícies. Façam o paralelismo com a reacção das grandes superfícies ao advento das Amazon e outras) e pensei logo nos encalhados e na sua fixação doentia nos custos, apesar das evidências factuais de que algo de diferente está a funcionar (o valor):

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"First comes the strategic bankruptcy, ..., where management’s sole focus is improving some arbitrary metric from last quarter, even when doing so actually interferes with customers trying to buy something else."

"the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest"

Quando comecei a ler/ouvir "Gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer, apesar do autor estar constantemente a repetir que "Less is More", nunca pensei na relação directa entre o trabalho do autor e as reflexões que faço sobre o meu trabalho de intervenção nas empresas.
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Contudo, comecei a juntar as peças quando ouvi:
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"Common sense suggests that forgetting stands in the way of good judgment. Earlier in this book, however, we met the Russian mnemonist Shereshevsky, whose memory was so perfect that it was flooded with details, making it difficult for him to get the gist of a story."
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E relacionei com os casos que Gigerenzer conta, uma e outra vez, em como os ignorantes, em n testes, conseguem bater os especialistas, em previsões desportivas ou concursos sobre geografia.
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Estou sempre a chamar a atenção para:

• Concentrar uma empresa no que é essencial;
• Responder à pergunta quem são os clientes-alvo e trabalhar paranoicamente para os servir;
• Ao modelar o funcionamento de empresas, não sejam como os franceses, não tentem incluir, não tentem contemplar tudo;
• Ao cartografar um processo, começar pela sua finalidade, pela sua razão de ser, pelo seu propósito;

Quando se sabe muito sobre um tema, podemos ser prejudicados pelo excesso de conhecimento quando a resposta não é lógica:

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"Imagine you are a contestant in a TV game show. You have outwitted all other competitors and eagerly await the $1 million question. Here it comes: 

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Which city has the larger population, Detroit or Milwaukee?

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Ouch, you have never been good in geography. The clock is ticking away. Except for the odd Trivial Pursuit addict, few people know the answer for sure. There is no way to logically deduce the correct answer; you have to use what you know and make your best guess.

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Daniel Goldstein and I asked a class of American college students, and they were divided—some 40 percent voted for Milwaukee, the others for Detroit. Next we tested an equivalent class of German students. Virtually everyone gave the right answer: Detroit. One might conclude that the Germans were smarter, or at least knew more about American geography. Yet the opposite was the case. They knew very little about Detroit, and many of them had not even heard of Milwaukee. These Germans had to rely on their intuition rather than on good reasons. What is the secret of this striking intuition? The answer is surprisingly simple. The Germans used a rule of thumb known as the recognition heuristic:

• If you recognize the name of one city but not that of the other, then infer that the recognized city has the larger population.

The American students could not use this rule of thumb because they had heard of both cities. They knew too much. Myriad facts muddled their judgment and prevented them from finding the right answer. A beneficial degree of ignorance can be valuable, although relying on name recognition is of course not foolproof."

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O nono capítulo "Less is More in Healthcare", um capítulo que mete medo, ao dissecar o pensamento dos médicos que os leva à sobre-prescrição, à sobre-medicação, e ao sobre-tratamento, termina assim:

• "Truly efficient health care requires mastering the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest. "

BANG! Aquelas palavras "the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest"

• "Good intuitions must go beyond the information given, and therefore, beyond logic."

Outro BANG!!! Uma estratégia, ou muitas estratégias bem sucedidas resultam porque não têm uma lógica linear... porque são fundamentadas em... "optimismo não documentado", em intuição.

It's not the euro, stupid! (parte III)

Parte I, parte II.
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Ontem, durante o jogging, ouvi uma uma parte do livro "Gut feelings : the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer".
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No capítulo 6 com o delicioso título: "Why Good Intuitions Shouldn't be Logical" gigerenzer chama a atenção para esta particularidade:
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"Mark got angry and Mary left.
Mary left and Mark got angry.
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Verona is in Italy and Valencia is in Spain.
Valencia is in Spain and Verona is in Italy.
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We understand in a blink that the first pair of sentences conveys opposite causal messages, whereas the second pair is identical in meaning. Only in the last pair is the and used in the sense of the logical AND. Even more surprising, we also know without thinking when and should be interpreted as the logical OR, as in the sentence
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We invited friends and colleagues.
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To this day, linguists are still working on spelling out the rules of thumb that underlie this remarkably intelligent intuition. No computer program can decode the meaning of an and sentence as well as we can. These are the interesting unconscious processes that we only partly understand, but which our intuition masters in the blink of an eye."
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Escrevo isto porque não me canso de me surpreender com o que os investigadores escrevem sobre a competitividade e a produtividade das empresas. A tríade de encalhados usa modelos obsoletos para explicar a realidade e, quando os modelos deixam de explicar a realidade... deixam de falar na realidade e continuam, como lapas, agarrados a ideias antigas que agitam sem contraditório.
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Ainda mais surpreendente, os investigadores que descobrem que os modelos estão obsoletos e avançam para a realidade para formularem modelos mais robustos, depois de muita investigação, depois de um caminho árduo, chegam ao topo da montanha onde já me encontro há alguns anos...
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Arrogância intelectual da minha parte? Não!
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O contacto permanente com PMEs que têm sucesso a exportar e a reflexão... por que é que estas empresas têm sucesso apesar da procissão de desgraças que os encalhados da tríade previram? Por que é que os gerentes das PMEs, muitos com a 4ª classe, fizeram o que Daniel Bessa postulava como sendo impossível?
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O percurso que me tem levado a Mongo, a "somos todos alemães", à vantagem do numerador e da eficácia sobre o denominador e a eficiência está retratado neste blogue e pode ser condensado neste postal de Agosto último "Promotor da concorrência imperfeita e de monopólios informais".
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Ainda hoje ouvimos os governos apelarem às empresas pequenas a seguirem o exemplo das empresas grandes, ainda hoje ouvimos dizer que as empresas grandes são mais competitivas que as empresas pequenas, que têm produtividades, que podem ser mais resistentes a choques de competitividade.
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Continua na parte IV, que tentarei escrever ainda hoje, com um exemplo que deita por terra todas estas ideias com um vector chamado China!

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Satisficers (parte II)

"A lone, hungry rat runs through what psychologists call a T-maze.

 It can turn either left or right. If it turns left, it will find food in eight out of ten cases; if it turns right, there will only be food in two out of ten cases. The amount of food it finds is small, so it runs over and over again through the maze. Under a variety of experimental conditions, rats turn left most of the time, as one would expect. But sometimes they turn right, though this is the worse option, puzzling many a researcher. According to the logical principle called maximizing, the rat should always turn left, because there it can expect food 80 percent of the time. Sometimes, rats turn left in only about 80 percent of the cases, and right 20 percent of the time. Their behavior is then called probability matching, because it reflects the 80/20 percent probabilities. It results, however, in a smaller amount of food; the expectation is only 68 percent.3 The rat’s behavior seems irrational. Has evolution miswired the brain of this poor animal? Or are rats simply stupid?
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We can understand the rat’s behavior once we look into its natural environment rather than into its small brain. Under the natural conditions of foraging, a rat competes with many other rats and animals for food.

If all go to the spot that has the most food, each will get only a small share. The one mutant organism that sometimes chooses the second-best patch would face less competition, get more food, and so be favored by natural selection. Thus, rats seem to rely on a strategy that works in a competitive environment but doesn’t fit the experimental situation, in which an individual is kept in social isolation."
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Interessante... quando se pensa na dispersão de produtividades, na dispersão de dimensões, na dispersão de produtos e serviços, na dispersão de mercados... na economia. E, já agora, no destino económico ser a mongolização, o aumento exponencial da dispersão de opções.
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Trecho retirado de "Gut feelings : the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer.

Satisficers

"People who reported exhaustive search in shopping and leisure were called maximizers, because they tried hard to get the best. Those who engaged in a limited search and settled quickly with the first alternative that was satisfactory or “good enough” were called satisficers. Satisficers were reported to be more optimistic and have higher self-esteem and life satisfaction, whereas maximizers excelled in depression, perfectionism, regret, and self-blame."
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Algo me diz que os economistas julgam que todos os agentes económicos somos "maximizers"... desconfio que muitos de nós são satisficers.
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Trecho retirado de "Gut feelings : the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer.

Simplesmente delicioso

"In the year 2000, the investment magazine Capital announced a stock-picking contest. More than 10,000 participants, including the editor-in-chief, submitted portfolios. The editor laid down the rules: he chose fifty international Internet equities and set out a period of six weeks in which everyone could buy, hold, or sell any of these stocks in order to make profit. Many tried to gain as much information and insider knowledge about the stocks as possible, while others used high-speed computers to pick the right portfolio. But one portfolio stood out from all others.
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This portfolio was based on collective ignorance rather than on expert knowledge and fancy software, and it was submitted by economist Andreas Ortmann and myself. We had looked for semi-ignorant people who knew so little about stocks that they had not even heard of many of them. We asked a hundred pedestrians in Berlin, fifty men and fifty women, which of the fifty stocks they recognized. Taking the ten stocks whose names were most often recognized, we created a portfolio. We submitted it to the contest in a buy-and-hold pattern; that is, we did not change the composition of the portfolio once it was purchased.
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We hit a down market, which was not good news. Nevertheless, our portfolio based on collective recognition gained 2.5 percent. The benchmark proposed by Capital was its editor-in-chief, who knew more than all the hundred pedestrians together. His portfolio lost 18.5 percent. The recognition portfolio also had higher gains than 88 percent of all portfolios submitted, and beat various Capital indices. As a control, we had submitted a low-recognition portfolio with the ten stocks least recognized by the pedestrians, and it performed almost as badly as the editor-in-chief ’s. Results were similar in a second study, where we also analyzed gender differences. Interestingly, women recognized fewer stocks, yet the portfolio based on their recognition made more money than those based on men’s recognition. This finding is consistent with earlier studies suggesting that women are less confident about their financial savvy, yet intuitively perform better."
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Trecho retirado de "Gut feelings : the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer.