Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte XIII)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII, parte VIII, parte IX, parte X, parte XI e parte XII. 

"for many of today’s industrial vendors the ability to create value is less than matched by the power to capture it, because in commoditized markets the customer is the driver in an unbalanced distribution of bargaining power. The consequences for suppliers can be serious: declining prices and margins, inferior returns on investment, and the risk of falling into a ‘commodity trap’ where the pressure on profitability leads to reduced investment in product (or service) innovation, which in turn leads to further loss of differentiation and even greater pressure on prices and margins. Few marketers can escape this vicious cycle with their shirts on.
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Can industrial companies counter commoditization and avoid falling victim to their ever more powerful, hard-bargaining customers?.
The answer for a growing number of companies is an affirmative one. These firms have learned that while core product advantages erode and pressure on prices never lets up, they can still do profitable business by pursuing value-added strategies including aligning themselves with key customers. Put differently, these companies have discovered profitable opportunities in stretching beyond their core products by offering customers compellingly differentiated values. They have thus successfully countered commoditization.
...
Consider the following examples.

• SKF, the world’s largest ball-bearing manufacturer, ... to maintain their production machinery, reduce or eliminate downtime and maximize plant yield.

• ...

• Raisio Chemicals, a major supplier of chemical compounds ... developing new products, upgrading paper quality and improving printability. The company offers its important customers access to its technical staff and facilities, including a unique pilot coating machine and a newly built printing plant, for testing and experimentation."

Dois exemplos da concentração nos inputs e não nos outputs.

Trechos retirados de "3 Countering Commoditization: Value-added Strategies and Aligning with Customers" de Kamran Kashani

To break through marketing clutter

"To break through marketing clutter, companies need to understand customer processes and the processes of their customer’s customer.
...
Value chain marketing requires marketers to develop an enhanced understanding of their industry, including activity at successive steps throughout the value chain, and to apply marketing tools to maximize effectiveness of the marketing programme up and down the value chain. New analytic tools to understand the industry must be deployed, and new tools to maximize marketing effectiveness must be developed. Value chain marketing challenges marketers to step into a broader framework where the dividing line between business strategy and market development is sometimes blurred.
...
The basic building block for understanding any industry is the macro business system. It includes all industry participants, connected in a successive chain of value added, from raw material production to OEM customers, wholesalers, retailers, retail customers and in some cases recycling. As in macroeconomics, where macro denotes the behaviour of the economy as a whole, the term ‘macro business system’ applies to an entire industry and all players upstream and downstream from a given competitor.
...
No industry business system is likely to resemble another.
...
Upstream component and material suppliers
...
Downstream manufacturers and processors
...
Secondary users or OEMs
...
Wholesalers
...
Retailers
...
Consumers and end users
...
Recyclers"

Trechos retirados de "Value Chain Marketing" de Jean-Pierre Jeannet

"Customers expect your attention to be on them"

Um excelente texto que recomendo para reflexão, sobretudo para os adeptos de Dick Dastardly, "The New Retail: Sell to Me in a Me2B World":

"Jeff Bezos said, “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we´ll turn out all right.”
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Many retailers today seem to do exactly this and try to compete with Amazon.com. It's not rare that I have conversations with retailers about implementing strategies to compete with, or even leapfrog, Amazon. I usually provocatively ask the question, “which part of Amazon would you aim to overtake?”
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Focusing on competing with Amazon isn't a winning strategy. Retailers, instead, need to laser-focus on their customers and not primarily on the competition.
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Consumers say, “Treat me like a person, not as a sales opportunity. Don´t just sell products. Sell to me!” [Moi ici: Pensar nos inputs do cliente e não nos outputs]
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Consumers are willing to pay more for positive experiences. Making individual consumers happy will be the ultimate driver for loyalty and differentiation. However, companies must first be able to see their own business through the eyes of the customer,
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How you sell what you sell is important! Customers expect your attention to be on them, not your competitors. It's all about more empathy, more fun and less friction, which results in happy customers for life."

"selling projects rather than products"

Outro texto delicioso e em sintonia com Mongo, "Selling Products Is Good. Selling Projects Can Be Even Better":

"In the beginning companies sold products. And then they sold services. In recent years, the fashionable suggestion has been that companies sell experiences and solutions, solving the needs and aspirations of customers.
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Companies, indeed, do all of these things. But increasingly, what companies sell are projects. To understand the difference, think of an athletic shoe company, such as Nike or Adidas. A focus on products means a focus on selling running shoes. A focus on experiences might mean they sell you a membership to a local running club. A focus on solutions might mean they figure out how to help you reach your goal weight. While these clearly offer more value than simply selling you a pair of shoes, they also have limitations. Selling products limits the revenues you can make from clients: Unless you are innovating and continually updating your product offering, customer attrition tends to be high, and incentivizing repurchases can be hard. Selling experiences provides intangible benefits that are hard to quantify and measure, often focusing on meeting the needs of one single customer, preventing any mass production. Selling solutions became popular in the early 2000s when customers didn’t know how to solve their problems. But today, in the internet age, people can do their own research and define the solutions for themselves.
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A focus on selling projects would mean helping someone do something more specific, such as running the Boston Marathon.
...
The project would have a clear goal (finish the marathon) and a clear start and end date.
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And that is just one type of project. More so than products, the possibilities with projects are endless. [Moi ici: Como não recordar - as pessoas e as empresas não compram o que compram, mas o que vão conseguir, processando o que compraram]
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Soon after launch, products are copied by the competition, which means they must be priced more cheaply. Soon, they become a commodity. This removes any opportunity for steady, high margins over the long term. Philips has experienced this even with its high-end health care products. Shifting its emphasis to selling projects rather than products was a strategic response to this problem.
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For example, Philips sells high-tech medical devices. In the past it sold them simply as products (and it still does). But now Philips seeks out the projects in which its products will be used. If a new health care center is being considered, Philips will seek to become a partner from the very beginning of the project, including the running and the maintenance of the new center."

Há tempos a trabalhar num projecto de reflexão estratégica para exactamente fazer esta transição de empresa de produtos para empresa de projectos, fui surpreendido no inicio pelo pedido para fazer uma análise Value Stream Mapping ao seu ciclo produtivo. Entretanto, com o andar do projecto passei a mensagem que se quisessem aplicar a análise Value Stream Mapping o fizessem à utilização do produto durante o ciclo de vida do utilizador final, como naquele "running and the maintenance of the new center".

Continua.

BTW, confesso que me estou a tornar num fan de Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez.

O actor, o seu problema e o valor (parte III)

Parte I e Parte II.

"For the buyer and seller an exchange contains several sources of potential benefits and costs:
• The sales contract or agreement describes the performance requirements for each party and is therefore a source of benefits and costs for each side. We will refer to them as the benefits and costs of the contract.
• The negotiation and carrying out of a transaction is not without costs. We refer to these as transaction costs.
...
• A transaction is not carried out in isolation from other transactions and processes in the environment. Almost every transaction has external effects of one sort or another. Hence we distinguish between the benefits and cost that arise directly from the exchange, and side effects that only become apparent in other exchanges. We refer to these side effects as side benefits and side costs from the perspective of the parties involved in the focal exchange.
...

The Buyer’s PerspectiveIf a product or service is provided as contractually specified, the buyer receives the contract benefits. These are the benefits the product provided contribute to solving a particular problem ... The meaning of the term “Product” in this context has to be interpreted in the broadest sense as a means of producing value, of solving problems: it comprises all the elements defined in the agreement including hardware, software, services, and ownership and usage rights. From the buyer’s perspective, a product is not a physical object but a means of solving a problem, with the associated perceived benefits. It is not the machine that constitutes the product but the availability of manufacturing capacity; the consulting process is not the product but the resulting ability of the buyer to deal with a problem in a better way.
...
The potential transaction benefits for a buyer arise independent of the emergence of an agreement during the buying process. One example is the know-how the buyer may gain from the seller as a result of their interactions, which may assist the buyer in later use of the product. Another is the positive experience the buyer has during the exchange process, from their own activities or those of the seller. The seller’s efforts to facilitate the buyer’s decision making, such as consulting advice, comparisons of alternatives, advertising, inspection tours, and test operations are yet another potential source of benefits that can increase the buyer’s trust in the seller and hence lower its transaction costs."

Trechos retirados de "The Market Process" de Wulff Plinke e Ian Wilkinson, capítulo incluído no livro "Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Marketing - Mastering Business Markets" editado por Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Wulff Plinke, Ian Wilkinson e Ingmar Geiger

O actor, o seu problema e o valor (parte II)

Parte I.

A motivação de um potencial cliente por uma interacção será tanto mais forte quanto mais forte for a pressão para resolver o seu problema. Três factores podem afectar essa pressão:

"The consequence of success or failureThe pressure to solve a problem will vary according to the perceived importance of fulfilling a task. If the execution of a task promises significant contributions to goal achievement, the exchange partner will try harder to solve the problem. ... The more important are the anticipated consequences of failing to solve the problem, the greater is the pressure for solution.
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Complexity of the task and the availability of means of solution
The more complex the task is perceived to be, the greater the pressure and effort required to find a solution.
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Limits on the resources available, financial or human, also increase the difficulty and pressure involved in finding a problem solution. This is because compromises have to be made with respect to budgets or the quality of the problem solution.
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Time pressure
The shorter the time available to solve a problem, the greater the pressure to find a solution. Time pressure may mean some options are not available, as when the time to submit a tender expires due to unexpected technical problems in tender preparation, or when costs will increase significantly if overtime rates have to be paid to extend working hour to complete a job on time."

Recentemente num projecto balanced scorecard onde a estratégia passa por subir na escala de valor trabalhando a interacção com um decisor vários níveis acima do cliente no ecossistema da procura, apareceu um tema como relevante para cativar esse decisor: "Prazos curtos".

O tema ainda não está resolvido, mas deixa-me cheio de dúvidas... associo prazos curtos a produtos padronizados. Produtos padronizados são um negócio de preço, prazos curtos não são compatíveis com tempo para interagir e criar algo novo. Também podemos estar a falar de "prazos curtos" não no sentido literal, mas curto no sentido de rapidez na criação de algo novo.

Trechos retirados de "The Market Process" de Wulff Plinke e Ian Wilkinson, capítulo incluído no livro "Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Marketing - Mastering Business Markets" editado por Michael Kleinaltenkamp, Wulff Plinke, Ian Wilkinson e Ingmar Geiger

Fricção positiva e negativa

"Negative Friction.
Friction is the idea that you are difficult to business with, that you make it difficult to transact, that more is required than should be necessary, and that the experience isn’t good. The worse your experience, the less likely you are to continue to buy from companies that create enough friction to drive you to seek other options.
...
Positive Friction.
In a super-relational, strategic relationship where human beings need to work closely to solve problems and generate results together, friction is positive. Meetings are friction, which is why much is written about the amount of time wasted in poor meetings. Perhaps it because of the Digital Age in which we find ourselves, little is written about how face-to-face meetings and a physical presence creates positive friction, the deepening of relationships and the engendering of trust.[Moi ici: Como não recordar "Every visit customers have to make is an opportunity for interaction and co-creation"]
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Conversations to understand what clients need, especially the conversations that include multiple stakeholders with different or competing perspectives, are another form of friction. The friction created by competing perspectives and working through to some reasonable consensus is the benefit of that friction.
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Would it be easier to send a survey to see how you are doing? Would an email accomplish the same goal without interrupting your busy client? While these choices might end a bit of friction, the positive friction that comes from a phone call is that it proves caring and high touch. The lower friction suggests transaction.
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It is a mistake to try to reduce friction when it is positive, just as it is a mistake not to remove it when it is negative."

 Ainda na semana passada preparei esta imagem para documentar estes dois tipos de fricção:

Trechos retirados de "Negative Friction and Positive Friction"

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte XII)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI, parte VII, parte VIII, parte IX, parte X e parte XI.

Recordar 

"Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs nada mais nada menos do que aplicar uma regra fundamental do Design Thinking.
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Começar pelo que o cliente, ou o consumidor, ou o prescritor (começar por um actor do ecossistema) precisa ou quer fazer. Quais as suas motivações, que problema é que está a tentar resolver.[Moi ici: Recordar sobretudo a parte IX]
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A Empatia é a chave. Não é acerca da nossa empresa. Precisamos da capacidade de perceber e partilhar os sentimentos de outros"

E considerar "How Not to Fail at Retail":

"Think About: Input Before Output
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We all know how online shopping works: a customer can search for products based on various criteria. But an online store isn’t very good at asking probing questions to find out what a consumer really cares about.
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As Frank asked me questions about what I wanted to accomplish with this new amplifier, he gathered key information before suggesting what the right solution would be. He put himself in a position to make recommendations to me that guitarcenter.com would never be able to make. And he helped me learn more about what was really important to me.
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Could I have bought the amp on guitarcenter.com? Sure. But now that Frank has acted like a trusted advisor and helped me with my decision making, I’m much less likely to close the deal online. And truthfully, the only place I even considered making the purchase was in-person, with Frank.
...
As an in-store salesperson learns about a consumer’s needs and interests, they can do something that an online retailer can do in only the most rudimentary fashion: frame the product’s story in terms of the particular benefits to this individual customer.
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An online product listing can tell of generic benefits, such as “gets your teeth their whitest” or “saves you $432 per year in energy costs.” An in-person retail experience can do so much more.
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Brick and mortar retailers have lost many of the advantages they once had, including providing better access to products and the convenience of “location, location, location.” But in-person retailers still have the advantage of proximate, meaningful human contact to that allows them to better listen to customers, collaborate with them and personalize their purchase experience."

"This wide gap deserves top management attention"

Segue-se um relato que não anda longe do que encontro quando trabalho com PMEs. Dirigentes que acreditam que o seu negócio é o que produzem, mas que depois dizem que a sua vantagem competitiva nada tem a ver com o que produzem, e tudo a ver com a interacção.

"Over the past twenty years, I have asked thousands of managers around the world Levitt’s question: “What business are you in”? And I have followed it up with another: “Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors?” In answer to the first question, the responses from managers in a wide variety of industries, from extraction, to pipelines, window frames, software, and banking, almost invariably still describe the product the company sells or the production facilities. I am always bewildered at how rarely the customer or the benefits the customers buys, enter the description. [Moi ici: Recordar a série "Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte XI)", particularmente a parte IX. Recordar também "Most people tend to describe what they do rather than the value they bring"] To many managers, the product is the business, just as in Levitt’s era. Firms continue to spend inordinate amounts of time, effort, and resources on their products. In fact, businesses are structured around their products: they have product divisions and product managers, profitability is measured by product (not by customer), planning meetings and budgets are product-based, and the managers’ hopes and aspirations are pinned on product innovation and the new product pipeline. Building better products, conventional wisdom holds, is their pathway to a better, less price-competitive future.
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My follow-up question aims to uncover what managers see as their particular competitive advantage, not just how they see their business – and it does one other thing: it reveals a puzzling gap between their product obsession and their customers’ behavior. So why do they think their customers buy from them rather than from their competitors? The responses consist of reasons such as “They trust us,” “Our reliability of supply and delivery,” “Our service,” “We are knowledgeable about their business,” “Our experience with other such customers,” “We make it seamless,” “They see us as unique,” “We’re in their consideration set,” and so on.
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Rarely is a better product mentioned, and seldom is a lower price seen as the reason customers buy from us. In other words, the “reasons customers buy from us” reside almost entirely in the interactions that take place in the marketplace: trust, reliability of supply, service, knowledge, and experience cannot be made in a factory, nor packaged and sold off the shelf. These are downstream sources of value. They have their origins in specific activities, processes, and systems the firm employs to reduce the customers’ risks and transaction costs.
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This wide gap between why customers buy from us (downstream reasons), and where we are spending most of our effort and resources (upstream) deserves top management attention – it can both increase efficiency by re-allocating effort to where it matters, and can build advantage by spending resources on activities that customers value and are willing to pay for."

Trecho retirado de "Why Do Your Customers Buy From You?"

Também por isto sou um contrarian (parte II)

Parte I.

A propósito de "Robôs destroem 440 mil empregos na indústria e comércio até 2030" e do pormenor:

"Indústria, comércio, transportes, funções administrativas e de públicas e agricultura. Estão entre os sectores onde o impacto da automação na destruição de emprego mais se fará sentir."

Sorrio e vou buscar "Report: Retailers have zero clue what shoppers really want":

"Hey, retail executive. It’s very nice of you to suggest I speak with your robot, but no, I’ll pass. It looks like there is a fully functioning human standing in the corner of your shop. Would it really be too much trouble to speak with him instead?
...
I’m not the only one who feels like this. In a report that comes as a surprise to absolutely no one but overeager retail execs, 95% of consumers don’t want to talk to a robot when they are shopping, neither online nor in brick-and-mortar stores. And 86% have no desire for other shiny new technologies either, like artificial intelligence and virtual reality. I, for one, don’t want to pop into a store to quickly pick up that alpaca sweater I saw online, only to have some sort of weird headset shoved in my face.
...
The vast majority of retail executives believe that AI and VR will increase foot traffic and sales, but 48% of shoppers say these technologies will have zero impact on whether they visit a store, and only 14% say they will make a purchase because of these technologies. This also applies to online technologies like chatbots. Seventy-nine percent of retail execs believe that chatbots are meeting shopper’s needs by providing on-demand customer service, while 66% of consumers disagree, with many respondents noting that chatbots are, in fact, more damaging to the shopping experience than helpful."

 Até parece que a batota da interacção entre humanos passa por robôs?!?!?!?!

E recordo a economia das experiências, "The experience economy is booming, but it must benefit everyone":

"The only companies that will exist in 10 years’ time are those that create and nurture human experiences. This learning and growth will come from maximizing opportunities, including the reinvention of retail spaces, new models of engagement, and an understanding of experiences as perhaps the most important form of marketing."

BINGO!! (parte II)

Parte I.

Ainda de "Value Never Actually Disappears, It Just Shifts From One Place To Another" sublinho outro tema clássico aqui no blogue:

"You Can’t Compete With A Robot By Acting Like OneThe future is always hard to predict. While it was easy to see that Amazon posed a real problem for large chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, it was much less obvious that small independent bookstores would thrive. In much the same way, few saw that ten years after the launch of the Kindle that paper books would surge amid a decline in e-books.
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The one overriding trend over the past 50 years or so is that the future is always more human. In Dan Schawbel’s new book, Back to Human, the author finds that the antidote for our overly automated age is deeper personal relationships. Things like trust, empathy and caring can’t be automated or outsourced.
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There are some things a machine will never do. It will never strike out in a little league game, have its heart broken or see its child born. That makes it hard — impossible really — for a machine ever to work effectively with humans as a real person would. The work of humans is increasingly to work with other humans to design work for machines.
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That why perhaps the biggest shift in value is from cognitive to social skills. [Moi ici: Engraçado que cada vez mais dou comigo a pensar que um número crescente de artigos em revistas ditas de gestão ocupam o seu espaço com temas que a minha mãe, ou a catequese, ou o pertencer a uma associação, ou o pertencer a um grupo de colegas de rua me ensinaram e que parece que agora estão em falta] The high paying jobs today have less to do with the ability to retain facts or manipulate numbers (we now use a computer for those things), but require more deep collaboration, teamwork and emotional intelligence."

O quanto os gigantes gostariam que o factor humano fosse removido da equação... mas a imperfeição é cool, e a desautomatização está a crescer.

"hav[ing] the conversation with the client"

Ao ler:

""One of the most common mistakes [small business owners make] is to avoid hav[ing] the conversation with the client regarding [the client's] expectations," the Speros pointed out. "These expectations can often be unrealistic, unmeasured, and don't match what they actually are trying to communicate."
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As a business owner, it is your responsibility to initiate that difficult conversation. Customers should have a realistic picture of what they are buying, including the cost of their purchase, what it includes, what they can expect as a result, and any return or refund policy you may have in place."

Como não recordar logo de imediato "aposta noutro mindset" onde a isto:

Contrapus:

"Every visit customers have to make are an opportunity for interaction and co-creation"

Trecho inicial retirado de "Customer Retention Strategies for Small Businesses"

Acerca do eficientismo

Este blogue fala do eficientismo e da paranóia da eficiência há muitos anos (por exemplo, em 2012 e 2011).

"The Problem Management has come to be seen as a science whose purpose is to make commercial enterprises more efficient. But the single-minded pursuit of efficiency makes businesses less resilient. [Moi ici: Por um lado, recordar os nabateus e a sua lição, por outro recordar a fragilização decorrente de uma estratégia pura e, em paralelo, recordar que o negócio do preço não é para quem quer, mas para quem pode]

...
The Solution Business, government, and management education need to increase their emphasis on organizational resilience. This will involve limiting the size of businesses, introducing more friction into global trade and the capital markets, giving long-term investors a larger say in strategic decision making, creating jobs that are richer in learning opportunities, and offering educational programs that balance efficiency and resilience. [Moi ici: Não vai ser preciso fazer nada disto com intervencionismo ingénuo basta deixar que Mongo faça o seu trabalho com a variedade, a proximidade, a interacção e a co-criação]
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Smith, Ricardo, Taylor, and Deming together turned management into a science whose objective function was the elimination of waste—whether of time, materials, or capital. The belief in the unalloyed virtue of efficiency has never dimmed. [Moi ici: Fui um crente a 100% na bondade da redução da variabilidade como estratégia para o sucesso, até que percebi que isso era uma visão redutora e só para quem pode, (Redsigma - O fim da linha) e quem pode é cada vez menos porque o mundo caminha para Mongo, o mundo da variedade]

A partir daqui divirjo da receita que Roger Martin prescreve. Em vez de intervencionismo, deixar Mongo fazer o seu caminho e não deixar que os estados apoiem os seus amigos-incumbentes.

Oh! BTW, lembrem-se da malta da Junqueira e da sua mania das grandezas.

Trechos retirados de "Rethinking Efficiency"

"transparency created value"

A propósito de "Cooks Make Tastier Food When They Can See Their Customers":

"The results showed that when the cooks could see their patrons, the food quality got higher ratings.
...
The results were pretty compelling: Customer satisfaction with the food shot up 10% when the cooks could see the customers, even though the customers couldn’t see the cooks. In the opposite situation, there was no improvement in satisfaction from the baseline condition in which neither group could see the other. But even more striking, when customers and cooks both could see one another, satisfaction went up 17.3%, and service was 13.2% faster. Transparency between customers and providers seems to really improve service. [Moi ici: De pessoas para pessoas. O poder da interacção. A força de Mongo]
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We consistently found that transparency created value.
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Being appreciated makes work meaningful. People feel what they do matters. Human connections seem to trigger that.
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What’s exciting is that these are often subtle alterations. It’s not expensive or difficult to create transparency between consumers and producers. Just by opening up the work environment, you could improve value and quality. Transparency becomes a low-cost strategic advantage."

Ao ler isto recordei-me do que escrevi sobre a Eureka em 2015 e 2018.

Agora a ordem tem de ser outra

As empresas que praticam na internet o tipo de publicidade que resultava no tempo dos mass-media nunca vão descobrir isto:

"The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims."

No tempo da internet, no tempo de Mongo, não adianta vomitar algo e depois tentar vender. Agora a ordem tem de ser outra:

"It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open.
The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.
It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”

Excerto de: Seth Godin. “This Is Marketing”. Apple Books.

“Globalization is becoming regionalization, and regionalization is becoming intra-national,”

A propósito de "More Factories Crop Up Closer to Customers":

"The largest share of manufacturers in at least a decade is spending to expand facilities, as companies look to build plants closer to their customers to offset record-high trucking costs and seek out pockets of available workers in a tight labor market.
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Twelve percent of U.S. manufacturers that invested in added capacity at domestic factories in the second quarter did so through building expansions, according to the Census Bureau, the highest proportion in the decade that metric has been released. Manufacturing construction spending hit a 16-month high in September, according to the Census Bureau. Executives are making some of those investments in new factories to alleviate rising transport bills and supply-chain bottlenecks.
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as the company seeks to make its products as close to customers as possible to speed up delivery times and cut logistics costs.
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Companies building plants nearer to customers say the investment costs can be made up in faster turnaround times and increased orders.
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Some companies also are trying to source more parts locally to mitigate the impact of U.S. tariffs on some foreign goods, said executives at Flex Ltd., which makes and ships products—including shoes and personal electronics— for other companies.
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“Globalization is becoming regionalization, and regionalization is becoming intra-national,” said Tom Linton, Flex’s supply-chain officer.""

A mim ninguém me tira a ideia de que Mongo tem um dedo importante nesta evolução: proximidade, rapidez, flexibilidade, interacção, co-criação

Algo para fermentar

Volta e meia repito uma frase que aprendi em São João da Madeira:

"O boi cresce mais com o olhar do dono do que com a erva do pasto"

Ainda ontem de manhã, em Felgueiras, a usei para resumir o que me estavam a contar. Fui com um controlador da qualidade de calçado visitar várias pequenas empresas que trabalham como costuras subcontratadas. Contou-me como em algumas costuras, a patroa olha para um modelo e visualiza logo a sequência de trabalho, alterando o posicionamento das máquinas para minimizar operações e tempos sem acrescento de valor.

No dia anterior tinha lido mais uma porção de "Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation to Join the Conversation on Next-Stage Organizations" de Frederic Laloux:

"Self-management has proven itself in many industries. There are, for instance, a number of very successful factories that operate in this way. One of them is FAVI, a five hundred-person brass foundry in the north of France that produces gearbox forks for the automotive industry, among others."

Estas pequenas unidades não têm nada a ver com o conceito de "self-management", mas é interessante como conseguem que muitas decisões cheguem mais próximo da trabalhadora da linha do que na produção de uma empresa de maior dimensão.

Entretanto, encontrei esta reflexão, "We need to shift our focus from competencies to agency":

"In mass-production, work corresponds mainly with what has been planned and budgeted. But today, knowledge work is understood as creative work we do in interaction. Unlike the repetitive business processes we know so well, where inputs are acted on in some predictable, structured way and converted into outputs, the inputs and outputs of knowledge work are problem definitions and exploration for solutions. Even more, there are no predetermined task sequences that, if executed, would guarantee success.
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Due to the variety of contexts people link to and work in, work requires interpretation, exploration and negotiation, work requires a new kind agency. What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what she believes the right answer is, but also about what other people think the right answers might be. Work, then, is exploration both what comes to defining the problems and finding the solutions.
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The industrial make-and-sell model required categorical skills, as we still know them. The decisive thing was your individual knowledge and individual education. Today, in new creative spaces you work more from your presence and network than your explicit skills. Agency is more important than education.
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The most important reason why we need a new concept of agency insted of competences is because the workers and their contributions in the post-industrial world are contextual and, at best, too diverse to rank. They are, and should be, too qualitatively different to compare quantitatively.
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Instead of talking about generic competences we need to focus on continuously developing agency."

Decididamente algo para fermentar.

A abominação da eficiência - o anti-Mongo (parte II)

Parte II.

Qual a reacção ao eficientismo? O toque humano, a co-criação, a proximidade, a interacção, ...

Voltemos ao livro "Reinventing Organizations: An Illustrated Invitation to Join the Conversation on Next-Stage Organizations" e à continuação do tema da mega-enfermagem:

"Jos had been working as a nurse for ten years and experienced firsthand the changes forced onto his profession. Disgusted, he quit his job and created Buurtzorg. It would operate entirely differently. Quickly, he found that a self-organizing team of ten to twelve nurses with no manager and no team leader was perfect to provide great care—and a great work place.
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With a whole different perspective on health care Care, at its best, is a small miracle that happens, or not, in the relationship of a patient and a nurse. That miracle never shows up when a mechanical perspective is applied to care. The best care will happen, de Blok is convinced, when nurses are seen as professionals, when they are trusted. Give them freedom, and they will offer truly great care.

Patients and nurses love Buurtzorg so much that nurses have been deserting traditional nursing companies in droves. Every month, Buurtzorg receives hundreds of applications from nurses wanting to jump ship. Buurtzorg now employs more than nine thousand nurses, or two-thirds of all neighborhood nurses in the Netherlands! The nine thousand nurses all work in small teams of ten to twelve nurses, without a leader in the team and with no manager above them. No one times the nurses’ interventions with patients. The whole nine thousand-strong company is managed with a headquarters of just twenty-eight people."

E a cereja no topo do bolo:

Mandando a eficiência às malvas, têm-se melhores resultados com os clientes, com os trabalhadores e com menos custos para o pagador.

Por momentos lembrei-me de reunião com um grupo de empresários, em que quiseram que eu demonstrasse que um euro a mais no preço unitário era melhor que um euro a menos nos custos unitários: a receita para a loucura do eficientismo é o Evangelho do Valor.

Mongo e o emprego

O que digo aqui sobre Mongo e o emprego?

• O fim do emprego modelado pelo século XX e elevado à categoria de modelo único e eterno.
• A ascensão dos artesãos
• A perda de valor no mercado dos cursos superiores porque já não haverá CV para apresentar, só um portfólio de projectos em que se participou

Tudo a ver com "Teenagers, Forget Engineering. Your Future Is Craft":

"A report by Altagamma, the Italian luxury goods association, estimated that some 50,000 people working in the luxury goods industry in Italy are close to retirement and that it will be a struggle to find qualified personnel to fill those jobs.
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The problem is, recent generations of Italian youth have increasingly shied away from traditional handwork, opting instead for seemingly more contemporary sectors like engineering, and cooking."

Recordar as preocupações com a automação... Mongo é sobre um mercado cada vez mais heterogéneo. Por isso, faz cada vez mais sentido fugir da produção em massa, e apostar na proximidade para fazer batota com a interacção e a co-criação. Assim, os robôs deixam de ser problema, porque tem de existir o criativo que interage com o cliente.

Em Mongo o futuro passará pela arte, pela criatividade, e longe do vómito.

Proximidade, interacção e co-criação

"As demands for higher value and creativity are the norm today and the complexity of offerings has grown, we have begun to see that the division of labor has reached its point of diminishing returns. What managers have learnt is that the division of labor always implies a scheme of interaction by which the different divided activities are made to work together. The lines between the boxes are starting to matter more than the boxes! Complex value creation is impossible without interaction. This is because any higher-value activity involves complementary, often parallel, contributions from more than one person or one team. In fact, the more complex the offering is and the more specialized the resources needed, the greater the demand for the amount, quality and efficiency of communication, because of the inherent interdependence of the activities."

 "Complex value creation is impossible without interaction" - recordar a importância da proximidade para a interacção por trás da co-criação:

• "para lidar com tribos aguerridas é preciso proximidade e interacção, co-criação" (2018)
• "A interacção e a necessidade da proximidade para a co-criação requererão empresas mais pequenas e ... "every laptop will be a corporation"" (2017)
• "Não esquecer o aumento da importância da proximidade produção-consumo, por causa da interacção e da co-criação que acabam por exigir rapidez, flexibilidade e customização." (2016)
• "Apostar na rapidez, na flexibilidade, na proximidade, na autenticidade, nas pequenas séries, na customização, na co-criação, na interacção" (2014)

Trecho inicial de "Interactive value creation"