Novas possibilidades, novos negócios

"Have you ever wanted to see your own face on the body of a Power Ranger or a Ghostbuster? Thanks to an ingenious partnership between Hasbro and 3D-printing specialists Formlabs, now you can. The Hasbro Selfie Series will let would-be heroes take a scan of their face with their phone and have a custom-made, look-a-like action figure delivered at some point afterward. In this initial blast, you can opt to become an X-Wing Pilot, Ghostbuster, Power Ranger or Snake Eyes from GI Joe, amongst others." 

Toda uma gama de potenciais negócios que podem decorrer deste tipo de possibilidades, conjugado com o interesse de diferenciação, de personalização.

Trecho retirado de "Hasbro will 3D-print your face onto its iconic action figures"

E Zeihan chega a Mongo!

E Peter Zeihan em "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" chega a Mongo!!!

Mongo é uma metáfora que uso há anos aqui no blogue para ilustrar um mundo económico pós-massificação. Eu cheguei lá por volta de 2007, uma sequência lógica da punção humana para a diversidade. Ele chega lá pela demografia e geopolítica. Ainda assim, penso que ele se fica mais pela dimensão das cadeias de fornecimento, pelas dificuldades da oferta. Eu prefiro adoptar o ponto de vista da procura.

"The longer and more complex the supply chain, the more likely it is to face catastrophic, irrecoverable breakdown.

That single statement contains a lot of angst and disruption.

...

The processes we use to manufacture things will change because the environment will change. Global economies of scale will vanish. Many of the technologies we use to manufacture goods under globalization will not prove applicable to the fractured world emerging.

That means that we, today in 2022, have a lot of industrial plant that just won't be relevant much longer.

...

It is all going to become stranded. Deglobalization-whether triggered by the American withdrawal or demographic collapse-will break the supply links that make most China-centric manufacturing possible, even before consuming nations more jealously protect their home markets.

...

The characteristics of this new industrial plant will reflect a fundamentally different macroeconomic, strategic, financial, and technological environment. It will be a bit different based on where that plant is located, but some common characteristics will exist across them all.

1.Mass-production assembly lines are largely out.

...

2.Reducing economies of scale reduces the opportunities for automation. Applying new technology to any manufacturing system adds cost, and automation is no exception. It will still happen, but only in targeted applications such as textiles and advanced semiconductors.  [Moi ici: Recordo o exemplo da Toyota e da Mercedes, mas o ponto não é o custo, o ponto é o estilhaçar da procura numa multidão de gostos]

...

3.The pace of technological improvement in manufacturing will slow. Let me make that broader: the pace of all technological improvement will slow. [Moi ici: Pelo contrário, acredito que a velocidade da inovação vai aumentar]

...

4. Supply chains will be much shorter. In a disconnected world, any point of exposure is a failure point and any manufacturing system that cannot snuff out its own complexity is one that will not survive. The model of dozens of geographically isolated suppliers feeding into a single, sprawling supply chain will vanish. Instead, successful manufacturing will twist into two new, mutually supportive shapes. ... Machine shops in particular should thrive. They can quickly absorb capital and technology and new designs and new workers, and crank out customized or rapidly changing parts for use in those larger, core facilities.

5. Production will become colocated with consumption. With the global map fracturing, serving a consumer market means producing goods within that market. For smaller and more isolated markets, this suggests extreme production costs due to an utter lack of economies of scale, as well as difficulty sourcing the necessary range of input materials. 

...

6. The new systems will put premiums on simplicity and security just as the old system put premiums on cost and efficiency. The death of just-in-time will force manufacturers to do one of two things.

...

7. The workforce will be very different. Between an alternating emphasis on customization and carrying out multiple manufacturing steps in one location, there isn't much room for people who don't know what they are doing."

O fim da globalização (parte IV)

Recently leaked China's population data confirm my estimates: births began to decline in 1991, with no peak in 2004 or 2011; Population is now less than 1.28 billion, not the official 1.41 billion; Population began to shrink in 2018, not 2031 as officially predicted. pic.twitter.com/xCge7cTRFS

— 易富贤YI Fuxian《大国空巢》 (@fuxianyi) July 9, 2022

Parte I, parte II  e parte III.

"The average grocery store today has about forty thousand individual items, up from about two hundred at the dawn of the twentieth century.

...

Take this concept of utter availability, apply it to absolutely everything, and you now have a glimmer of the absolute connectivity that underpins the modern, globalized economy. The ingredients of today’s industrial and consumer goods are only available because they can be moved from—literally—halfway around the world at low costs and high speeds and in perfect security. Phones, fertilizers, oil, cherries, propylene, single-malt whiskey . . . you name it, it is in motion. All. The. Time. Transportation is the ultimate enabler.

...

The East India Company traded about 50 tons of tea a year at the start of the nineteenth century and 15,000 toward the end of it. Today that same 15,000 tons is loaded or unloaded somewhere in the world every forty-five seconds or so.

...

In the age of globalization, everyone could get in on global access, manufacturing, and mass consumption. No longer was value-added work sequestered to the Imperial Centers. Manufacturing elsewhere required fuel and raw materials. Expanding industrial bases and infrastructure elsewhere required the same. Expanding middle classes elsewhere demanded even more.

...

In a world "safe" for all, the world's "successful" geographies could no longer lord over and/or exploit the rest. A somewhat unintended side effect of this was to demote geography from its fairly deterministic role in gauging the success or failure of a country, to something that became little more than background noise. Those geographies once left behind could now bloom in safety.

...

The ability to diversify supply systems over any distance means it is economically advantageous to break up manufacturing into dozens, even thousands of individual steps. Workers building this or that tiny piece of widget become very good at it, but they are clueless as to the rest of the process. The workforce that purifies silicon dioxide does not and cannot create silicon wafers, does not and cannot build motherboards, and does not and cannot code.

This combination of reach and specialization takes us to a very clear, and foreboding, conclusion: no longer do the goods consumed in a place by a people reflect the goods produced in a place by a people. The geographies of consumption and production are unmoored."

Segundo o autor de "The End of the World is Just the Beginning", Peter Zeihan, a globalização está a descarrilar pelo descalabro demográfico nos países produtores e consumidores, e pelo fim da Ordem Americana. Há muito que escrevo sobre a desglobalização, mas por causa de Mongo. A demografia é uma variável que raramente é considerada como refiro na parte III. 

Alguns flashes sobre o futuro

Alguns flashes sobre o futuro:

• The rental washing machine arrives: Haier revolutionizes laundry

Pay-per-wash com manutenção e consumíveis incluídos. 

• Grupo de Braga constrói hotel em Guimarães, com seis pisos, em 10 meses

Isto para mim é voltar a 2004-2008 e a um projecto industrial nesta vertente. (Uma harmonia de propostas de valor recíprocas). Destruído por um suicidio na Alemanha na sequência do VW short squeeze.

O fim da globalização (parte III)

Parte I e parte II. 

Na parte II ilustro como o autor aborda o tema do colapso demográfico. Nesta parte III sublinho os trechos que se seguem:

"More products. More players. Bigger markets. More markets. Easier transport. More interconnectivity. More trade. More capital. More technology. More integration. More financial penetration. More and bigger and bigger and more. A world of more.

Ever since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, human economics have been defined by this concept of more. The world's evolution within the idea of more, this reasonable expectation of more, is ultimately what destroyed the old economies of the pre-deepwater imperial and feudal systems. 

...

Geopolitics tells us the post–World War II and especially the post–Cold War economic booms were artificial and transitory. Going back to something more “normal” by definition requires . . . shrinkage. Demographics tells us that the number and collective volume of mass-consumption-driven economies has already peaked. In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.

...

Combine geopolitics and demographics and we know there will be no new mass consumption systems. Even worse, the pie that is the global economy isn't going to simply shrink; it is being fractured into some very nonintegrated pieces, courtesy of American inaction.

...

We aren't simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history.

...

First, everything is going to change. Whatever new economic system or systems the world develops will be something we're unlikely to recognize as being viable today. We will probably need far higher volumes of capital (retirees absorb it like sponges), but we'll have far less of it (fewer workers means fewer taxpayers). That suggests economic growth and technological progress (both of which require capital as an input) will stall out.

...

Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been "more" on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity's economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once."

Já repararam que no discurso ambiental este tema não é referido? No cenário central, até 2080 Portugal perde 2 milhões de habitantes. Ao mesmo tempo que o número de idosos crescerá mais um milhão de pessoas e a população em idade ativa (15 a 64 anos) diminuirá de 6,6 para 4,2 milhões de pessoas. O tipo e quantidade de consumo vai cair.

O autor, americano, julgo que vítima da doença anglo-saxónica foca-se muito na produção em massa. Teremos menos produção em massa e mais Mongo. Por isso, este capítulo designado "The end of more". Teremos menos globalização e mais blocos económicos.

Trechos retirados de "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" de Peter Zeihan. 

O papel da personalização

"Personalization is not only a crucial capability, it's one that punches above its weight, no matter whether the company is a digital native, a brick-and-mortar player, or a behind-the-scenes producer or supplier.

Consumers don't just want personalization, they demand it. With store and product loyalty more elusive, getting it right matters. Roughly 75 percent of consumers tried a new shopping behavior in the last 18 months, and more than 80 percent of those intend to continue with new behaviors.

Furthermore, our research found that companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from those activities than average players."

Ainda esta semana tive uma interacção com uma empresa... ao fim de muitas barreiras consegui chegar a um humano que resolveu o problema.

Trecho retirado de "The value of getting personalization right-or wrong--is multiplying"

Big data e experiência dos clientes

A propósito de "Customer Experience in the Age of AI":

"brands can win by tapping a deep store of customer information to transform and personalize user experiences. From the pre-internet dawn of segment-of-one marketing to the customer journey of the digital era, personalized customer experiences have unequivocally become the basis for competitive advantage. Personalization now goes far beyond getting customers’ names right in advertising pitches, having complete data at the ready when someone calls customer service, or tailoring a web landing page with customer-relevant offers. It is the design target for every physical and virtual touch-point, and it is increasingly powered by AI.

...

We are now at the point where competitive advantage will derive from the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and from the use of AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey."

Recordei o que li em "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford:

"The algorithms that analyze big data are trained using found data that can be subtly biased.

...

One thing is certain. If algorithms are shown a skewed sample of the world, they will reach a skewed conclusion.

...

There are some overtly racist and sexist people out there—look around—but in general what we count and what we fail to count is often the result of an unexamined choice, of subtle biases and hidden assumptions that we haven’t realized are leading us astray.

...

Big found datasets can seem comprehensive, and may be enormously useful, but “N = All” is often a seductive illusion: it’s easy to make unwarranted assumptions that we have everything that matters. We must always ask who and what is missing. And this is only one reason to approach big data with caution. Big data represents a huge and underscrutinized change in the way statistics are being collected, and that is where our journey to make the world add up will take us next."

Depender do coração

Ontem, no LinkedIn, encontrei esta mensagem:

E sorri.

Da Revolução Industrial até Mongo em 3 fases!!!

 Como não relacionar com o tema da arte (depende do coração)!!!

• A "Grande" lição da minha vida
• Qual a alternativa?

A caminho de Mongo

"Welcome to the factory of the future: It's smaller, more nimble, and run by highly skilled Americans. Just as important, networks of these facilities could crop up across the United States, bringing manufacturing closer to your consumers and lessening your reliance on a crippled global supply chain."

Esta descrição de Mongo parece retirada deste blogue.

Trecho retirado de "The Factory of the Future Is Here--and It's Run by Americans (and Small Robots)"

"a return to the local"

Há anos que escrevo sobre Mongo, um mundo repleto de picos na paisagem competitiva.

Recordo, por exemplo, Criatividade e Mongo (Maio de 2011).

Em "Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It" consulto o capítulo "6 The World Is Spiky":

"a return to the local. For decades, supply chains have been getting longer; production processes more international. The various components of a car might be manufactured in a dozen countries and assembled in more than one. In the future, however, manufacturing can happen near to the consumer. Thanks to the wonders of 3D printing, components can be produced locally; while the design might come from anywhere, the finished product can be crafted in a local workshop and handed to a customer who lives close by.

...

We often assume that the more high-tech a society becomes, the more global and borderless it will be. And until recently, that has often been true. But not any more. Many exponential technologies lead to a return to the local. These breakthrough technologies favour the near over the far. 

...

The result is an era in which, once again, geography matters – with economic activity set to become increasingly local.

There is an irony here. The economic paradigm that brought about the Exponential Age, globalisation, has fostered technologies that will lead to a return to the local. But our political and economic systems were not designed to cope with the new age of localism.

...

Perhaps even more revolutionary than our newfound approach to raw goods is the shifting world of manufacturing. In the Exponential Age, manufacturing is becoming less about putting trainers, phones, car components or prosthetics onto standardised 20-foot containers and shipping them around the world. Instead, manufacturing is taking the shape outlined by Angelo Yu. The idea is shipped across the globe, but the building process takes place at a printer or fabricator close to the point of consumption.

...

And so here we can make out a new system of global trade. Gone will be the world of poor countries manufacturing goods for rich countries, and shipping these products across the world. Instead, each rich country will begin to make its own goods at home, for a domestic market.

...

Decreasing reliance on commodities could immiserate large areas of the global economy, bringing with it untold political instability.

...

The key cause is, once again, the rise of the intangible economy – and the effect it has on labour markets. Value in this intangible economy is created through highly complex products."

Recordar que o seu campeonato tem de ser outro

Antes de avançar neste postal duas ressalvas:

• Não tenho qualquer informação do terreno, esta experiência de 1987 já estará desactualizada, ou não. 
• Uma boa estratégia tem de ser uma estratégia e ser boa. Ser uma estratégia é mais fácil de testar. Basta recordar o clássico "Mais vale ser rico e com saúde do que pobre e doentio". Assim, se outros olhando para uma estratégia são capazes de visualizar uma alternativa, quer dizer que estamos perante uma estratégia. Saber se essa estratégia é boa ou não, já depende da capacidade de execução e da resposta do mercado.

Ao longo dos anos, aqui e na minha vida profissional, abordo com frequência alguns temas:

• o ecossistema da procura
• os clientes-alvo
• Mongo versus a comoditização.

Este fim de semana li "Imperial e Valor ambicionam ser o "maior player ibérico de chocolate"" e ficou-me um travo amargo na boca. Nem uma vez li "consumidores", "paixão por chocolate", e mesmo "clientes" aparece uma vez como substantivo colectivo escrito pelo autor do artigo. O negócio são números e quota de mercado. 

Pela leitura do artigo percebe-se que o modelo de negócio está focado nos donos das prateleiras, são esses o cliente-alvo. Fair enough, escolha legítima. Neste postal de 2017 anotei que até a Nestlé deitou a toalha ao chão nos EUA. As empresas que querem liderar via quota de mercado precisam de apontar ao cliente menos exigente, menos conhecedor, precisam que o cliente seja plancton. 

O que é que eu prego às PMEs desde 2006? Volume is Vanity, Profit is Sanity.

Talvez esta organização tenha acesso a fundos que financiem o crescimento necessário para combater no negócio do preço. Os decisores de PMEs que leiam este artigo devem recordar que o seu campeonato tem de ser outro. BTW, não esquecer aquela frase na coluna das citações:

"When something is commoditized, an adjacent market becomes valuable"

Mongo é assim!

Introdução:

"Altra running has sped up. Naturally. And as the Denver-based company celebrates 10 years of natural running, the growth of the footwear company only continues.

Known on the trail for its Lone Peak and on the road for the Torin, the uniquely designed footwear has experienced steady progress over a decade and a rapid rise over the past year with 17% growth from spring 2020 to spring 2021 and 54% growth during the height of the pandemic."

As tribos apaixonadas (os assimétricos), we are all weird:

"“The brands offering uniquely different propositions, a different direction, those are the brands growing the fastest. What we are seeing is that through the pandemic we are still growing at a faster percentage than the traditional brands.”"

Skin-in-the-game, não é inovar, é resolver um problema:

"The two eventually ran the store and the self-professed shoe geeks started tinkering. Working with a nearby resoler, they started customizing off-the-shelf running shoes to reduce the wedge on the heel and open up the toe box for a more natural foot splay."

Quando David se aproxima de Golias este despreza-o. Quando a Deutsch Post fez a proposta de um veículo eléctrico à VW esta rejeitou por falta de volume:

"The co-founders went to every running brand they could to “beg them to build” shoes the way they were creating them after market, but when nobody would—and some laughed in their faces—they did it themselves.

Altra started with a road shoe, the Instinct, pre-launched in April 2011 ahead of the brand’s true August 2011 launch. “It’s just been an amazing 10 years of trying to encourage people to look at shoes differently,” Beckstead says."

Trechos retirados de "Altra, One Of The Fastest-Growing Running Footwear Brands, Celebrates Natural Running"

Para reflexão

"The era of export is coming to an end. Instead of making and sending goods, it becomes a trend to send money and data to make and supply goods locally. It means that the world is ending in a world where labor is cheap and raw materials are cheap.

The world economy in the era of the so-called 'post-corona' as predicted by German business thinker Dr. Hermann Simon.

...

"The era of hyper-globalization, when exports amounted to twice the GDP (gross domestic product), is over, and we are now entering the era of de-globalization. “As local production increases through FDI (foreign direct investment), exports will decrease, and the restructuring of the global economy will accelerate accordingly,” he said.

...

“Companies have learned how easily global supply chains can collapse (due to a pandemic). An alternative is to set up a production base overseas where raw materials and parts can be directly supplied, and operate it through an independent local corporation. In other words, instead of investing in the country where the head office is located, we invest overseas where there are demand sources or raw materials. 

...

In the past, it was not easy to set up a high-tech factory abroad. However, advances in advanced technologies such as 5G (5th generation mobile communication) and 3D (3D printer) are making this possible. “It is now possible to send data in real time to make things (with 3D printers) in factories on the other side of the world. There is no longer any need for products to be moved between countries. This means that the global supply chain (GVC) can be reorganized to be the center of the data flow (rather than the flow of parts and raw materials).”

Dr. Simon said, "These days, quite a few CEOs (CEOs) say that it is 'like a miracle' when they see companies running well without business trips or face-to-face meetings." This experience is not just a surprise, but leads to a 'sympathy' between the business owners and professional managers that 'it is okay to give more autonomy to overseas branches and manpower'. “It doesn't matter where the headquarters is anymore. Now, the important thing for CEOs of global companies is to find a region that is optimized for 'the industry we are good at'."

Trechos retirados de "“The era of living on exports will end after Corona,” a world-class business scholar warns" 

Em Mongo, cuidado com o "plástico"

 “Las marcas o son activistas o no serán”

Leio isto e penso em tanta coisa escrita aqui no blogue ao longo dos anos:

• Tribos apaixonadas;
• Suckiness of giants;
• Irmãos de sangue;

E penso nos gigantes que querem ser tudo para todos e serão vistos, sentidos como fake pelos apaixonados:

A marca pró-Trump será banido pelos anti-Trump e vice versa. A marca pró-Brexit será banida pelos anti-Brexit e vice versa. E isto a um nível cada vez mais granular.

Frase inicial retirada de "Enric Jové (McCann): “Las marcas o son activistas o no serán”":

"Las marcas o son activistas o no serán. No hay posición para que una marca no tenga un punto de vista como tendría una persona sobre la sociedad, sobre el planeta e incluso, si quiere, sobre la política de un país. Aquí hay tres grandes ejemplos de marcas de moda. Una es Nike, con Black Lives Matter y, antes, con Colin Kaepernick. Las dos otras son Patagonia y Levi’s. Ambas se posicionaron a favor del voto en las elecciones donde Trump optaba a la reelección. Clarísimamente las marcas tienen que tener una posición clara sobre todo aquello que afecta a la sociedad, a los países donde intervienen y, sobre todo, al planeta. Y en moda, la sostenibilidad y la trazabilidad serán primordiales en el futuro próximo, si no lo son ya actualmente."

" olha para a mesma realidade e vê oportunidades"

Ao longo dos anos tenho escrito aqui no blogue sobre o advento de Mongo (aka Estranhistão) e sobre a democratização da produção, sobre os makers e makerspaces (ver marcadores abaixo).

Assim, como não sorrir ao ler "The Autonomous Factory: Innovation through Personalized Production at Scale" (a única coisa que me deixa algum desconforto é a interpretação que se possa dar aquele "at scale" porque penso naquele "tu não és do meu sangue", porque penso na paixão assimétrica das tribos).

Mongo não é só capacidade de produção customizada a custo aceitável, Mongo é também paixão, interacção entre produtor e utilizador, Mongo é pertença à mesma tribo. Julgo que muita gente ainda não percebeu isto, não basta ter capacidade produtiva, tem de se ser capaz de sonhar com e desafiar o outro, fazedor ou utilizador. Por isso, estas experiências feitas pelas Siemens deste mundo são bem vindas, aprecio-as pragmaticamente pelo trabalho de pavimentação que fazem para os pequenos que virão depois. Os pequenos nunca teriam poder para alterar leis feitas no "século XX" para proteger um mundo que se vai desvanecendo, tal como a Uber.

Vamos a alguns trechos do texto:

"Nowadays, consumers expect the ideal product in terms of size, material, shape, color, quality and other individual needs and specific requirements. Advances in technology and digitalization have created a significant market for individualized offerings. Personalization at scale has the potential to create $1.7 trillion to $3 trillion in overall new value. Capturing this value requires companies mastering the underlying technologies and enabling consumers to be their own product designers [Moi ici: Essa é a primeira fase "to be their own product designers", mas para isso não precisamos de empresas, precisamos de espaços ao estilo "Grab-and-Go" com máquinas 3D e pouco mais. A segunda fase é quando entram os designers, os desafiadores, os curadores, os que ajudam a afinar o gosto. Espaço para cooperativas de fazedores].

...

Producing companies are therefore facing pressing questions: How can a production process evolve to meet these personalization demands? How to decide on the best automation strategy? And how will the future of production ultimately look like? It essentially comes down to the question: What to automate and to which degree? It can be all too easy to get carried away with automation for its own sake, but the result of this approach is almost always projects that cost too much, take too long to implement and fail to deliver against a company’s business objectives and operations strategy. [Moi ici: Este trecho faz logo lembrar as experiências da Mercedes e da Toyota que já entraram na fase da desautomatização por causa da flexibilidade que precisam. Li este trecho umas três vezes nas últimas 24 horas e sempre emergiu na minha mente a foto que serve de papel de parede numa sala de reuniões de uma empresa. No texto que escrevi em 2017 cometi um erro, assumi que a fábrica era anterior à electricidade. No entanto, depois percebi que no tecto estavam as lâmpadas ... eléctricas. O que ainda reforça mais a pergunta que faço no tal postal de 2017, "Quanto tempo?". Já temos as peças todas, mas ainda não aprendemos, ainda não dominamos como as vamos organizar. Julgo que o maior obstáculo está na mente, a formatação a que fomos sujeitos coloca-nos palas que escondem o que para quem virá mais tarde, será um duhhh!]

...

The extent of twenty-first-century customization and personalization also requires production businesses accommodating a large variety of versions of any given product, which must be produced in smaller batches with very short lead times. This Low Volume – High Mix production typically means lot sizes of less than 20 pieces (occasionally, down to 1 piece only) per ordered lot, involving increased complexity and administration cost. The fundamental challenge for producing companies can therefore be formulated as: Maximizing overall productivity under

• higher personalization (i.e. increasing variety of product versions)
• smaller and variable lot sizes
• shorter product life cycles (i.e. shorter time spans available to production)"

Lembram-se da VW e a Deutsche Post? A maior barreira é a formatação da nossa mente, sempre em busca da big bet idealizada no século XX. Incumbente, linha vermelha, vê a evolução acima "This Low Volume – High Mix production" como uma fuga do Paraíso, uma pedra no sapato. A organização do futuro, linha a preto, olha para a mesma realidade e vê oportunidades.

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte VIII)

 Parte I, parte II, parte II, parte IV, parte V, parte VI e parte VII. 

"Throughout this book, we argue that all revenues are not equally profitable—some produce high profits, and some actually produce losses. But are all profits equally desirable?

The surprising answer is no—and the key to understanding the difference between “good profits” and “bad profits” is demonstrated in 

The desirability of an investment is not just a function of the likely returns but also a function of the strategic relevance (whether the investment moves the company’s strategy forward). 

...

Consider the upper left quadrant: high returns but low strategic relevance. This quadrant is quicksand. These investments look very attractive, but they take the company’s capital and focus away from its main line of business. All too many companies have unclear and unproductive positioning because they lack the discipline to say no to attractive-looking investments that don’t fit. Ultimately, companies that pursue these types of investments get picked off by highly focused competitors. These are the investments that produce bad profits.

Think about the lower right quadrant: low returns but high strategic relevance. These are investments that would show up at the bottom of a simple capital budgeting ranking, but they are essential to moving the company forward. Here, the watchword is courage, a character trait that is especially critical in today’s transforming business world.

...

The moral of the story is that while investments in the upper left quadrant produce bad profits, investments in the lower right produce “good losses.”"

Trechos retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes.

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte VII)

 Parte I, parte II, parte II, parte IV, parte V e parte VI.

"Cost reduction provides another landmark example of the power of transaction-based profit analytics. In virtually all supply chain projects, the objective is to reduce costs. The analytical process is to identify the costs that are above average and reduce them to at least average levels. What could be wrong with this?

The answer is that neither simply reducing higher-than-average costs nor reducing costs across the board will maximize profitability. The reason is that the Profit Peak customers are often more costly to serve—and rightly so because the extra customer service costs are a great investment."

Como não regressar ao Senhor dos Perdões e ao discurso monolítico sobre um todo homogéneo:

"Most strategic analyses are based on an assessment of a company as a whole. This is an artifact of the Age of Mass Markets. So-called strengths-weaknesses- opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis, and even Michael Porter’s powerful Five Forces framework, illustrate this approach. Profit contour analysis significantly enriches these analytical models because it shows the composition of a company’s component segments and activities, allowing managers to see their underlying patterns of profitability, which have historically been hidden by aggregate, average metrics.

Companies are not monolithic. For example, profit contour analysis indicates how much a company would be helped by better positioning (for example, which segments are helped, which would suffer profit erosion in the absence of repositioning, and which are well positioned already). It also indicates how difficult, costly, or time-consuming the transition will be (for example, what proportion of the products or vendors have to be changed). This is especially important in addressing the specific problems and opportunities that the currents of change pose.

...

In analyzing possible strategic groups in both your current and transformed industry, it is very instructive to focus on the value-to-cost relationship of your major profit segments: Profit Peaks, Profit Drains, and Profit Deserts."

Trechos retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes.

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte VI)

 Parte I, parte II, parte II, parte IV e parte V.

"It all starts with choosing your customer, or, as we put it, selecting your strategic group and then aligning and organizing your functional capabilities to meet your diverse and rapidly changing customer needs.

The Manager of the Future must be adept at what we call Value Entrepreneurship, which we define as teaming with peer managers to constantly push the envelope of the company’s customer value footprint in its diverse target market segments in a tight but flexible way. 

...

The Age of Mass Markets was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s when rail, water, and road transportation enabled local markets to integrate into national mass markets. This agglomeration of volume converged with innovations in manufacturing, marketing, and distribution—like assembly line production; mass media like newspapers, radio, and broadcast television; and national networks of distributors—to create massive economies of scale. In this context, the most important strategic imperative was to get big.

All this began to change a few decades ago. The change was largely driven by technology. Computers came into widespread use, the internet was developed, and both wireless networks and narrowcast technologies like cable TV were deployed. These innovations accelerated companies’ ability to reach out directly to customers and microsegment markets and to accumulate data so that they could micro target customers. Manufacturing innovations like small-batch production, robotics, process automation, and additive manufacturing broke down economies of scale, enabling companies to produce niche products and services targeted at individual segments and even at individual customers.

...

While getting big was the strategic imperative in the Age of Mass Markets, the strategic imperative of the Age of Diverse Markets is to adroitly manage complexity. Today, successful companies must be expert at choosing their customer, aligning their resources, and managing their organization to target and meet the needs of the most lucrative, defensible parts of the emerging market in their transforming industry."

Trechos retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes.

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte V)

 Parte I, parte II, parte III e parte IV

Recordem este velho esquema deste blogue:

E o teor do texto que se segue:

"The pervasive fear felt by so many incumbent company managers is rooted in the false assumption that the currents of change, of which Amazon is emblematic, will completely disrupt industries and leave no place to hide or prosper.

In fact, hundreds of studies of industry profitability in the industrial organization economics literature show the opposite. The most profitable overall industry configuration is one with a relatively small number of competitors, with each having a different strategy and each being very profitable—some serving small customers, others serving large customers; some offering arm’s-length service, others building-integrated customer relationships; and so on. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the industry model of a big winner and a lot of losers consistently provides low overall profits to all industry participants.

Today, the winning strategy is “choose your customer."

...

The overwhelmingly important problem for all too many managers in incumbent firms is that they are stuck in the obsolete strategic paradigm of the fading Age of Mass Markets in which the primary goal is to maximize all revenues while minimizing all costs. In essence, they are choosing all possible customers, which is no choice at all."

Agora reparem neste trecho, parece retirado daqui do blogue:

“Continuing to act on the obsolete assumption that all revenues are good and all costs are bad leads all too many managers to dilute and waste resources trying to hold on to all of their business, rather than choosing their customers and focusing on building their high-profit, defensible business in their target strategic group. This is the single most important issue in business today, and most managers do not even see it.”

Trechos retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes.

"the Age of Diverse Markets" (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.

Os trechos que se seguem são retirados de “Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive” de Jonathan S. Byrnes e ilustram algo que escrevo aqui há muitos anos. Basta recordar a curva de Stobachoff:

"to determine which parts of its business were making or losing money. When they saw the results, they nearly fell off their chairs:

• About 18 percent of their customers, which we call their Profit Peak accounts, accounted for about half of their revenues but produced over 130 percent of their profits.
• About 30 percent of their customers, their large money-losing Profit Drains, accounted for about one-third of their revenues but drained off about 50 percent of the profits earned by the rest of the company
• About half of the company’s customers were Profit Desert customers who accounted for about 20 percent of the revenues and produced less than 10 percent of the profits."

When Edison’s managers saw this, they immediately understood that their price war strategy was a response to the profit-draining customers’ demands, while they were essentially ignoring their critical high-profit customers.”[Moi ici: Demasiado comum. Recordo a espécie de esquema Ponzi]

 E pensa que só acontece aos outros? E como é na sua empresa? Ainda na passada quarta-feira ao telefone tive uma conversa surrealista, parecia um case-study acerca do que são custos afundados. A diferença é que numa empresa o que acontece com ela fica com ela, o mesmo já não se passa quando o decisor é um ministro.