Ideias versus prática (parte I)

Ao ler "Business Strategy - Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise" de  J.-C. Spender, há uma constante: a valorização da prática, da experimentação.
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Por exemplo:

"Debate is fine but practice is what matters
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Thus no theory can embrace all the issues a practice engages.
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Judgment is always necessary to reasoned practice, a view theorizing tries to deny.
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strategists are always working with particulars and so have limited interest in theoretical statements
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Doubt is key - we must remain open to the possibility that things are not what they seem."

Ao ler "The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas" de Michael Schrage encontro além de "Acerca de Keynes (parte II)" mais isto:

"Joseph Schumpeter. A brilliant rival to Keynes, he disagreed about the importance of ideas in making innovation happen. “Successful innovation…,” he wrote in 1928, “is a feat not of intellect but of will. Its difficulty consists in the resistance and uncertainties incident to doing what has not been done before. …”
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For Schumpeter, commitment to overcoming resistance and managing uncertainty—not cultivation of intellectual prowess—determines innovation outcomes. Ideas aren’t irrelevant to Schumpeter, who was arguably as much an intellectual elitist as Keynes. But he recognized their inherent inferiority to action when it comes to the marketplace. Aspiring entrepreneurs shouldn’t invest too much in inferior goods. Real innovators—real leaders—know that actions speak louder than words and behave accordingly."

Ao ler "Sometimes Being Wrong Can Be More Valuable Than Being Right", encontro o mesmo padrão:

"While the Gödel and Turing showed that logic was no longer absolute or infallible, its flaws were manageable and the systems they created in its place made the information age possible.  Out of the rubble of Aristotle’s logic, a new world was born.
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Entrepreneurs engaged in creative disruption keep the system humming along, so as long as we have innovation, there is no contradiction.  We do have rent seeking, such as car dealers lobbying against Tesla, which is a problem, but not an insurmountable one.
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In the process, we learned something important.  It’s not business per se that creates value, but innovation."

"Não é desilusão, é a simples constatação de que as coisas estão distantes daquilo que tenho ensinado"

Na sequência de "Acerca de Keynes (parte II)", e em resposta a um comentário do Paulo Peres, encontrei estes trechos nesta entrevista:

"O que é que lhe está a custar mais nesta nova tarefa?.
Sair de uma aula de Ética Médica com alunos de Medicina do 5.o ano e, nas minhas tarefas de administração, não conseguir fazer o que ensino. Está-me a custar ver que há uma grande diferença entre os pareceres, artigos, livros e congressos e o que se passa na gestão de um hospital. Sei que a gestão do hospital não se pode fazer estritamente "by the book", mas se seria bom os bioeticistas mergulharem por dois ou três meses na gestão de cuidados de saúde, quem tem responsabilidades de gestão na saúde também devia ter outra formação teórica.
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Só está a ter agora essa percepção?.
Nunca tinha estado numa administração! Fiz a carreira na ética mas era um simples médico que trabalhava numa consulta de grávidas. Fui chefe de banco, fiz urgências, mas nunca tinha tido de decidir e assinar de 15 em 15 dias a compra de 1,5 milhões em medicamentos.
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Mas sente o quê, desilusão?.
Não é desilusão, é a simples constatação de que as coisas estão distantes daquilo que tenho ensinado. Tem de haver transparência, prestação de contas, decisão informada e eu dou por mim a ver que me faltam dados. Como é que posso tomar uma decisão informada se não tenho os dados todos? Admito que os medicamentos que estou a comprar são os adequados porque confio nos meus colegas mas uma decisão eticamente responsável tem de seguir estes passos, o que exige tempo, colaboração, transparência."

O que Schrage critica na frase de Keynes, na minha interpretação, está relacionado com a preocupação acima manifestada pelo professor de ética tornado gestor. As nossas ideias, as nossas teorias, as nossas hipóteses de explicação do mundo serão sempre tentativas incompletas e imperfeitas de o descrever e de prescrever uma linha de actuação.
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Ontem, durante o jogging, ouvia o comentador de futebol, Luís Freitas Lobo, defender que o treinador Lopetegui desenhou uma estratégia para o clássico de Domingo passado e, durante o jogo, ficou demasiado tempo preso a essa estratégia. Lembrei-me logo de Napoleão:

"A estratégia inicial não resiste aos primeiros minutos da confusão da batalha"

A realidade não só é imperfeitamente percepcionada por nós, como está em permanente convulsão, tornando verdade hoje o que ontem era mentira e vice versa. Por isso, Schrage no seu livro "The Innovator's Hypothesis" valoriza o papel da experimentação sobre o intelectual.
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Acerca de Keynes (parte II)

Parte I.
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Mais uma agradável surpresa de Schrage, uma crítica a Keynes e a todos os que sentados nos cadeirões das universidades, dos ministérios e do twitter, botam discursos, botam explicações e muita teoria, sem nunca tentar, sem nunca experimentar, sem nunca arriscar... vem logo à memória a velha história de Daniel Bessa e o calçado...

"Too many businesspeople have been bullied, brainwashed, and highbrow-beaten into believing that economic value creation is rooted in intellectual breakthroughs. They’ve been persuaded - perhaps even intimidated - by the eloquent specter of John Maynard Keynes’s famous cliché: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else . Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
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Bold words, indeed—but, with respect, what does one expect an elitist Cambridge don with a well-deserved reputation for intellectual snobbery to say? That Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution required the collaborative energies of rigorous tinkerers like James Watt and entrepreneurial opportunists like his partner, Matthew Boulton? That the engineering prowess of Isambard Brunel, Richard Trevithick, and Charles Parsons transformed the world’s railways, sea transport, and energy production? That John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless business practices at Standard Oil altered how ambitious innovators perceived economies of scale and scope? That Henry Ford’s relentless focus on design simplicity and production efficiency redefined what manufacturing meant? That college dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg might one day lead  multibillion-dollar ventures that turned personal computing into mass media worldwide?
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Of course not. Keynes and his intellectualizing apostles are above the practicality of all that. Yes, those innovators may have pioneered new industries, overturned establishments, and improved the quality of life for millions. But, in Keynes’s reality, they’re entrepreneurial ‘meat puppets’ in thrall to the transcendent influence of defunct economists and dead philosophers. For Keynes, ideas from economics and economists - not tools or technologies from scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs  - are what really rule the world.
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Who are we kidding? The arrogance displayed here is exceeded only by its historical inaccuracy. Keynes offers little but the propaganda of his professional genius to make his point. The sweeping pomposity of his assertion recalls George Orwell’s tart observation that “some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Indeed. This particular absurdity thrills intellectuals for an excellent reason: it makes them the heroes and aristocracy of innovation.
That’s why understanding this arrogance is important. This intellectual superiority justifies the condescension so many idealists and ideaholics bring to postindustrial innovation. Contemporary Keynesians aren’t Harvard-trained economists debating how much money governments should print to stimulate demand. Rather, they’re intellectual capital–obsessed idealogues who evangelize that good ideas are more valuable than strong currencies.
Ideas sit at the white-hot center of innovation and value creation in this economic universe. They channel their Lord’s fundamentalist ideal, both in their descriptions of how they think the world works and their prescriptions for how they think the world should work. Ideas über alles.
This describes the power struggle confronting innovators everywhere. Academics, intellectuals, and the peddlers of good ideas have declared ideas and intellect the central pillars of innovation. People who don’t appreciate the power and potential of good ideas are either idiots or apostates. They’re doomed. Pity them or damn them, but please get them out of the way."

Acerca de Keynes (parte I)

"John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was the British economist whose name was much bandied about as the theorist behind the recent US and Eurozone “bailouts.” He remarked practical business people are often unwitting intellectual slaves to dead economists. This applies whenever managers think strategic decisions can be rigorously data-driven. Perhaps there was a time when strategy theorists really believed in the relevance of rational decision-making. I urge readers away from the idea of strategizing as a dehumanized numbers-driven quasi-science and towards a practical economic humanism, an urgent task for many reasons, professional, social, and political. Real people have limited capabilities, as Simon’s notion of “bounded rationality” captured. Numbers-driven thinkers have gotten us into a fair amount of trouble of late but social reform is not my objective.
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I see strategizing as the practice of synthesizing as many of the available facts as possible, together with personal judgments when facts are not available. It is not an implementation of scientific theory and rigorous analysis. It is an active creative process, pushed forward by the application of personal judgment, not by sitting back and presuming the facts or theory can drive a solution. The academic tendency is to write personal judgment out of the story and claim theorizing as a superior mode of thought, to presume theory lords it over practice, that a theory of strategy would be more real or valuable than effective strategic practice.
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Academics sometimes patronize managers because they understand things in ways that managers do not. But managers know a great deal about what they are doing even though they seldom write about it in great depth. Academics tend to write more but understand less."

Trechos retirados de "Business Strategy - Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise" de  J.-C. Spender.