Escapar a todas as sistematizações

Só nos anos 70 do século passado, na Escola de Harvard, Kenneth Andrews:

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"His definition of strategy identifies it as the roll-it-all-up-into-this framework by which a company is to determine what the enterprise is and what it wants to be.

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For Andrews, "corporate strategy is the pattern of major objectives, purposes, or goals and essential plans for achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be."

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Andrews also was clear on the proposition that a company's strategy was, within certain constraints, the product of choices made by its leaders - still a surprinsingly novel idea in academic circles of that era."

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E agora a grande surpresa, tal como previ há dias, se só descobriram isto em Harvard nos anos 70 do século passado, quando é que isto terá chegado ao mainstream das escolas de economia no resto do mundo?

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"Andrews found that contrary to what contemporary economists would have predicted, different companies in that industry actually had different cost structures and different levels of profitability, mostly because competitors pursued different product and sales strategies"

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Respirar fundo!!!

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Reler o último parágrafo.....

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Por fim, para destroçar os partidários do Grande Planeador, os partidários da redução de salários, os jogadores de xadrez que não podem jogar contra si próprios:

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"Andrews took pains to describe his conception of strategy as reflecting a general manager's point of view - in contrast to the economist's view, which he had little use for. Economists, he argued, failed to take into account the rich variety of issues that such a manager should consider in charting the company's future, including relating strategy to the needs of society, the environment, and the manager's personal values, and parsing how "organizational processes and behavior" conduced to "the accomplishment of purpose."

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"Individual companies and industries were just too idiosyncratic, and the ambitions and values of their managers too rich and varied to be mapped on any single template."

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Leio isto e faço logo a ponte para alguns textos de Pedro Arroja, como este "soluções pessoalizadas".

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Como defendeu Andrews, como eu defendo aqui neste espaço, contra a ditadura dos custos dos macro-economistas, a solução única não existe, só existem soluções pessoais, adequadas à realidade de cada empresa, de cada organização. Uma solução para cada organização escapando a todas as sistematizações.

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Pelos vistos 30 anos não foram suficientes para chegar ao mainstream...

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Trechos retirados do livro "The Lords of Strategy" de Walter Kiechel III.

Lords of Strategy

Ando a ler um livro que é uma espécie de biografia da consultoria sobre estratégia, "The Lords of Strategy" de Walter Kiechel III.

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Impressiona perceber que tantas coisas que tomamos como garantidas no mundo dos negócios só foram equacionadas e formuladas nos últimos 40 anos.

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Sorri, porque o subtítulo do livro sobre o Balanced Scorecard, "Concentrar uma organização no que é essencial" está em sintonia com os primeiros desafios que o primeiro dos Lords da Estratégia, Bruce Henderson, encontrou nos seus primeiros trabalhos:

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"The family-owned company proudly turned out a dizzying variety of the wheels, some sold in huge volumes to customers like carmakers, others in small lots to manufacturers more specialized.

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As with Westinghouse and its line of motors, this variety turned out to be the problem. Smaller competitors that concentrated on making just the high-volume products were coming in and picking off Norton's biggest customers by charging less. Norton found itself in the dismal situation of seeing its costs, averaged across all lines, going up even as the average price it could command for products headed down.

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Norton thus posed for the consultants the first example of a kind of case they would encounter repeatedly, soon to be classified under the heading market segmentation."

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Mais à frente "it takes a long swim of the imagination to get one's mind back to an era when the notion that "businesses exist to produce results" was something that had to be called to readers' attention. The same holds true for the concept that a business could be actively, consciously managed to that end... Blowing past such hidebound-ness and timidity to install a new, agressive consciousness in business executives was precisely what the strategy revolution was about."

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"While its basic truths are so ingrained today that we take them as eternal and unchanging laws of nature - "everyone knows that"- when first proclaimed, they were electrifying: businesses should expect their costs to decline systematically, at a rate that can be accurately predicted."

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Comentários ao livro aqui.