Onde está o seu locus de controlo?

Gosto dos decisores com o locus de controlo no interior, quando o mundo muda não culpam o mundo, mudam eles no que fazem ou no que pensam.

Os estúdios de cinema estão a virar-se para os ecrãs pequenos, a maioria dos donos das cadeias de cinema protestam e querem ser protegidos de um futuro que não os inclua (sim, ainda deviamos estar todos a pagar o salário dos fabricantes de velas de iluminação do século XIX)

Alguns recuam, olham para a nova paisagem e posicionam-se de um outra forma:

"Streaming services are devaluing movies as appointment viewing, but there’s already evidence that theaters can succeed by making the experience more, well, special. Late in 2019, Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse offered extremely popular “rowdy” showings of the panned Cats, encouraging audiences to shout and laugh at the terrifying, gyrating computer-generated felines on screen. It also delivers restaurant-quality food and dozens of craft beers straight to patrons’ seats.

Alamo Drafthouse has also discovered that customers want to privately rent entire theaters during the pandemic, a service that makes up 50% of its top-line revenue today. (Cinemark says it has sold more than 100,000 private watch parties, generating at least $10 million in revenue.) That service may also be easier to book in the future. “I’ve never considered at-home streaming our competitor,” says Tim League, founder of Alamo Drafthouse. “We are an out-of-home experience. We’re competing against restaurants, bars, and clubs.”"

Chega-se ao fim e apetece fazer o exercício de "Oceano Azul" ou o de Horwath - Em que é que vocês são bons?

Em tempos de experimentação de novos posicionamentos ou ofertas, porque nem sempre a nova oportunidade é clara, é importante ter em conta os velhos estóicos:

"pivoting market shapers should keep one foot on the ground"

Melhor ainda, o mito do filho de Gaia, Anteu.

Trecho retirado de "Streaming Isn’t Killing Movie Theaters. It's Making Them Better"

"Em que é que vocês são bons?"

Uma das perguntas que mais vezes coloco, quando trabalho a vertente estratégica de uma empresa:

- Em que é que vocês são bons? Em que é que se diferenciam? Qual é a vantagem competitiva desta empresa?

Quase sempre a resposta não é clara, não aparece de imediato. Precisa de tempo para emergir. Não basta ao consultor expressar a sua opinião, mesmo que esteja certo, se a empresa não está ciente, não está compenetrada, dessa vantagem, não a vai usar, não a vai trabalhar, não vai fazer batota com ela. Claro que ás vezes essa vantagem não aparece na conversa porque, verdadeiramente, ainda não existe.
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Já quase a terminar a leitura de "Elevate" de Rich Horwath encontro uma ferramenta que visualiza o desafio que lanço às empresas. Sou um visual, por isso, a ferramenta atraiu-me logo:

Chama-lhe "Trade-Off Zone" e faz-me lembrar as curvas de Kim e Mauborgne em "The Blue Ocean Strategy".
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Listar do lado esquerdo um conjunto de características relevantes para a oferta da empresa e avaliar o desempenho comparativo da empresa face a vários concorrentes:

A figura mostra logo se existem diferenças entre as várias empresas e onde. O objectivo não é ser bom a tudo, o objectivo é ser diferente em alguma coisa que seja realmente importante para os clientes-alvo.
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Este é um ponto-chave, para os clientes-alvo:

"To construct a Trade-Off Zone for your business, first select the specific type of customer that the offering is targeting. In some cases, the root of poor strategy is trying to be all things to all customers. If some potential customers are not happy with how you're choosing to bring value to the market, it's a sign that trade-offs have been made. The point is that effective strategy is going to upset some potential customers, be they internal or external customers. Learn to live with it. Just as a real leader isn't going to please all followers, a real strategy isn't going to please all customers.
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The manager then rates their offering for each of the trade-off factors as low, medium, or high, as seen by the targeted customer. Competitive offerings are then plotted, creating trade-off profiles, to determine where differentiation exists within the Trade-Off Zone. If your trade-off profile mirrors the competition, work needs to be done to determine the trade-off factors targeted customers value, and how to create positive differentiation around them."

"When senior leaders are tasked with growing a business"

Mais um trecho interessante retirado de "Elevate", de Rich Horwath:

"As the results show, your ability to craft, communicate, and execute sound strategy will determine the firm's financial results. It's one thing to ask a manager to reduce costs by 15 percent. She will readily come tip with a laundry list of ways to reduce costs. It's an entirely different thing to ask a manager to profitably grow the business 15 percent. She will most likely be stumped or trot out the same old line-up of tired tactics. When senior leaders are tasked with growing a business, many quickly turn to the acquisition of other companies. Mergers and acquisitions capture many of the headlines in business publications, but do they capture profitable growth? While some companies have become experts at identifying M&A candidates and then successfully blending the new business into the existing one, it's not necessarily the norm. Multiple studies over the past 20 years have shown that the majority of acquisitions actually destroy their own shareholder's value."

Por isto é que torci logo o nariz ao título sobre o novo plano estratégico da PT.
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Por isto é que o Paulo Peres estava preocupado com este resultado para as empresas brasileiras em "A fome de aquisições do empresário brasileiro"

Acerca da criação do valor

Não estamos de acordo com a linguagem de Rich Horwath em "Elevate":

"At its core, a business is a value delivery system. [Moi ici: Como se o valor fosse criado pelo fornecedor... não, prefiro pensar no valor como criado pelo cliente] Once you've decided how to create value as described in the value proposition, you must then determine how to go about delivering that value. The deliver phase of the business model begins with the value chain, [Moi ici: Como não recordar "The Power of Co-creation" e a percepção de que cada vez mais as empresas têm de perceber que não controlam parcelas crescentes da cadeia de valor...] a useful tool in visualizing how an organization delivers value to its customers. While the value proposition takes an external view of value from the customer's perspective, the value chain takes the internal organizational view."

Acerca dos ecossistemas do negócio

No livro "Elevate" de Rich Horwath encontrei estes trechos sobre um tema que nos é muito caro, o dos ecossistemas dos negócios:

""A system is a set of things - people, cells, molecules - interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. It's an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something."" ... As a system develops, it generates patterns of behavior due to the connections between elements in an organized fashion. That's one of the reasons it's important to look at your business strategy as a system, involving your employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, and shareholders. Changes in any one of these elements or their connection (relationship) to others can fundamentally alter the course of your business. Strategic planning sessions that don't fully take into account the market, customers, competitors, and the company itself yield half-baked strategic plans that will crack under the pressure of changes in the system. Understanding the systems that comprise your business is an important part of developing long-term strategy.
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"" And a lack of systems thinking can lead to competitive disadvantage as Nokia CEO Stephen Elop lamented, "Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem."" 

Qual é o ecossistema do seu negócio? Sabe se o pode alterar em seu favor?

"If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."

Esta manhã, numa empresa, discutia-se a cadeia de valor no cluster do calçado e, como é que o sector dos fornecedores dessa empresa poderia subir na escala de valor, para acompanhar o ritmo do calçado.
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- Está a imaginá-los a dar esse salto?
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A minha resposta foi algo do género:
- Não precisamos de mudar esse sector, basta-nos trabalhar com o vosso fornecedor em particular, basta-nos trabalhar com ele.
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Os outros virão atrás quando começarem a ver as consequências e os bons resultados.
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De tarde, a caminho do fim-de-semana, resolvi fazer uma caminhada de 6km, por entre os ex-campos de milho, a ler mais umas porções de "Elevate" de Rich Horwath encontrei:

"One of the reasons strategic planning has become a mind-numbingly, ambiguous exercise is because it's not translated to the individual level. Managers work to feed a PowerPoint deck with information and data that they themselves won't use after the dog-and-pony show presentation is concluded. A sociology study on the donation behaviors of individuals sheds some light on why this might occur. The study showed that people are more willing to donate money to help a single starving African child than to help many starving children. Interestingly, the researcher also found that contributions dropped dramatically when the individual child's picture was accompanied by a statistical summary of the large number of needy children like her in other countries." Similarly, when we see a specific, individualized issue, we are more likely to respond to it. When we're faced with a general blob of information, we tend to tune it out. The lesson for leaders: Tailor the meaning of the strategy to your audience and how it relates specifically to them and what they're doing on a daily basis. As Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.""

Confusões acerca da estratégia

"Even at the highest levels of organizations, confusion abounds as to what exactly is a strategy. Perhaps due to its abstract nature, strategy tends to mean different things to different people. It’s often confused with mission, vision, goals, objectives, and even tactics.
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Failure to provide managers with a universal definition of strategy, and clear examples to refer to, leaves the term open to interpretation, creating ineffective plans and inefficient communication.
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Professor Richard Rumelt describes the problem this way: “Too many organizational leaders say they have a strategy when they do not. . . . A long list of things to do, often mislabeled as strategies or objectives, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do.”

Trecho retirado de "Elevate: The Three Disciplines of Advanced Strategic Thinking" de R. Horwath