Ecossistemas e serviço

Um pequeno artigo com uma pérola para reflexão:

"The paper aims to introduce and conceptualize customer ecosystems as perspective on service. In this paper we discuss implications of considering not only the customer but the customer’s ecosystem when designing and operating service business. A customer ecosystem is defined as systems of actors related to the customer that are relevant concerning a specific service. [Moi ici: Isto faz-me pensar em Drucker. O cliente nunca compra o que o fornecedor pensa que está a vender. Um ecossistema não é uma função do que se produz, o output, mas uma função do input no sistema do cliente] This means that the customer ecosystem is defined based on a specific service. ... The customer’s ecosystem represents a constantly changing influencer affecting the customer’s activities and service experiences.
...
This paper proposes a customer ecosystem perspective on service. The focal point is not what the provider does to produce a service offering but what the customer does with the service as part of her own dynamic and collective ecosystem. [Moi ici: Cá está] ... Value is not created in providers’ service (eco)systems, instead value is experientially formed in the customer’s ecosystem. The core of customer ecosystems is not the co-creation of value in interaction, instead the core is how the customer configures meanings and constructs value in relation to her own ecosystem influenced by the customer’s goals, positions and roles and the whole social context."

Não é correcto desenhar um ecossistema do negócio sem equacionar a estratégia da organização, sem equacionar a sua proposta de valor e os clientes-alvo.

Na semana passada uma primeira reflexão sobre o tema numa empresa gerou um mapa como o que se segue:

Por onde circulam os produtos e serviços, por onde circula a informação, por onde circula o tempo.
Clientes, clientes dos clientes, utilizadores, prescritores, influenciadores.

Interessante que a proposta de valor do lado direito é bem diferente da do lado esquerdo.

Trechos retirados de "A customer ecosystem perspective on service" de Päivi Voima, Kristina Heinonen, Tore Strandvik, Karl-Jakob Mickelsson, Johanna Arantola-Hattab

"You can’t shape your customer"

Este texto de Alex Osterwalder, "You Don’t Design Customers, You Understand Them (Or Not)", merece alguma reflexão:

"What he had done was retrofit the customer profile against the digital payments solution they’ve worked out.
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Now, it’s ok to sketch out the customer profile for a customer you’ve never met in a meeting room. However, you then have to immediately go and verify (and get a reality check) if your assumptions from the meeting room were true. From those tests you adapt and modify the customer profile based on what you’ve learned. Only now, armed with this verified information, you are ready to design the appropriate solution.
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You can’t shape your customer. You can only understand the customer. The value proposition is where you make choices: you decide which jobs, pains and gains you want to address with which solutions. Get out of the building to understand your customer, then shape your value proposition around them. While this might sound like common sense, it’s still not common practice."

Não quero ser diletante nem, como conta Pedro Arroja, ser aquele tipo que numa conferência, na parte das perguntas e respostas, coloca uma pergunta ao orador e acaba a querer fazer ele próprio uma conferência, mas acho que há motivo para reflexão.

Alex Osterwalder escreve, e bem, para startup-people. Eu escrevo sobre a realidade a pensar nos meus clientes-alvo, PME industriais. As PME industriais com que trabalho querem dar uma sapatada no status quo em vivem, mas têm alguns constrangimentos: têm uma herança, ou seja uma estrutura produtiva e comercial que não se pode deitar fora como a água de um banho, têm um espaço de Minkowski (As posições anteriores limitam as posições futuras afinal os macacos não voam)

... e, sobretudo, têm pouco dinheiro.

Assim, ao contrário da liberdade de uma startup uma PME pode estar perante uma situação que se pode traduzir desta forma: sou o que sou, a minha vantagem, ou o que pode ser a minha vantagem é o que sou e não posso mudar - por falta de dinheiro, por autenticidade, por falta de alternativa, por falta de outras experiências. Nesse caso, o que a empresa produz não se altera mas tem de alterar quer o cliente, quer a abordagem comercial:

"Se calhar não é a lã que tem de mudar, se calhar são os mercados onde se quer vender os produtos autênticos feitos com ela que têm de mudar. Como no exemplo da artesã de Bragança, ou das tábuas de cozinha, ou do burel de Manteigas, ou os "Tecidos tradicionais em lã como o burel, a samarra ou o sarrubeco" de Albano Morgado."

Assim, para muitas PME aquele "You can’t shape your customer" não pode ser levado à letra. Elas têm de ir a todo o mundo à procura dos clientes que se ajustam ao que elas podem oferecer com vantagem. Sei que isto roça o limite e pode ser interpretado quase como arrogância estatal que trata os contribuintes como reféns. Não é desprezo pelos clientes, é não ter alternativa de recursos para investir em mudanças.

Considerem os empresários do calçado cheios de dinheiro ou de acesso a financiamento e com uma tradição de gestão bem maior, imaginem o que teriam feito quando a China invadiu o Ocidente com o low-cost... teriam deslocalizado. Em vez disso, tiveram de subir na escala de valor e subir às árvores como no exemplo dos 20 para os 200€. Assim, fazem uma análise da sua situação e concluem: só posso sobreviver se trabalhar para este tipo de cliente ...

Outro ponto que merece reflexão em "You can’t shape your customer" é: não se modifica um cliente individualmente, mas acredito numa frase que será "You can shape your market":

• Arquitecto de paisagens competitivas (parte II) (Junho 2012)
• Driving markets (Maio de 2014) (Storbacka escreveu um livro em finlandês cujo título era qualquer coisa como: market driving not market driven)
• Acerca dos ecossistemas (Setembro de 2014)
• "markets are not – they become" (Marlo de 2015) ("markets are malleable and subject to multiple change efforts. Markets are always in the making, or paraphrasing Vargo and Lusch: markets are not – they become. This opens up questions about how market actors join in and influence this process of becoming in practice.")
• Assumir o desafio de mudar um mercado (parte IV) (Janeiro de 2018)

Em suma, a startup vai-se reformulando e pilotando até se ajustar ao cliente-alvo. A PME-tipo percebe onde pode actuar e depois procurar os clientes, ou trabalho o mercado, com quem pode ter sucesso. 

Por isso uso os marcadores lá em baixo.

"the more important it is to think about boundaries"

"If 'management' is the art of achieving efficiency within a more or less defined framework, 'leadership' is the art of navigating an organization through structural change. Structural change may mean adverse conditions.
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If leadership is the same as helping an organization navigate through structural change, it must be based on an understanding of both external (contextual and business) dynamics and internal dynamics.
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Business systems are being reconfigured. No definitions, no boundaries are sacred.
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Co-production takes place in networks. 'Workers' are no longer employed but wandering nomads crossing invisible and undefinable boundaries everywhere. Companies invent means to influence what goes on far beyond their legal boundaries. They see customers and other value constellation partners as equally important to manage as 'employees'.
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This lack of boundaries, this haze, this lack of definition in the physical world, paradoxically requires us to think more, not less of boundaries. The paradox that the more boundaryless the world seems to be, the more important it is to think about boundaries [Moi ici: Ponto muito interessante, na senda de "First, define yourself, then, define your audience"]
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If we are to keep our sense of purpose and identity, we must have an idea of what we are and who we are. But the more the physical world becomes blurred, the more this sense of identity must come from reflection, from activities performed in the conceptual domain. [Moi ici: Outro ponto interessante, não somos o que fazemos, somos mais do que isso, somos os resultados que ajudamos a atingir, somos o progresso que facilitamos, somos os sonhos que ajudamos a cumprir]
Conceptualizing must compensate for the haziness."

Agora relacionar estes sublinhados com as reflexões sobre o tecto de vidro e a incapacidade de fazer escolhas dolorosas, sobre a dificuldade de deixar de pensar apenas no que se produz, o output, em vez de equacionar os inputs.

Trechos de Richard Normann retirados do seu "Reframing Business"!!!




tecto de vidro

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte VIII)

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

"servicification. This means that the emphasis, when we look at offerings, is no longer on the production process that historically created them as outputs, but in their property as inputs in the value creating process of the customers system. This shift of emphasis from production to use, from output to input, from the past to the future, immediately widens the scope of what an offering is, what kinds of characteristics a company needs to build into its offerings, and what competences are required of the company. It also automatically shifts the emphasis from the transaction to more long-term relationship with the customer…
experiencification. By this I mean that offerings are now increasingly designed to be linked also into the mental and symbolic processes of customers including the meaning and purpose of their value-creating activities. In fact, many offerings which seem like products are simply artefacts which fulfill the function of bringing to the customer a context, a story even, which is somehow meaningful to him. Artefacts link a more general, external reality with and inner, personal, reality into a whole characterized by the pursuit of meaning and purpose."

Escrever sobre este título "Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs" e recordar uma linguagem muito usada em empresas industriais:

- "A expedição é o cú da fábrica!"

Trechos retirados de "Reframing business" de Richard Normann.

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte VI)

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

"to shift our attention from production to utilization, from product to process, from transaction to relationship. It enhances our sensitivity to the complexity of roles and actor systems. In this sense the service logic clearly frames a manufacturing logic rather than replaces it. Creative business thinking comes from applying the service logic mode of thought, recognizing that within that overriding logic there are islands of a manufacturing logic. In other words, the service logic encourages us to think in terms of value creation and Value-creating Systems. It moves us from the oversimplified view that 'producers' satisfy needs and desires of 'customers' to the much richer but more complex view that they together form a Value-creating System. Within that system the provider has to find a way to position himself, and enhance and leverage the value creating process of the customer. It helps us move from the traditional industrial notion of products as outputs to the value-creation economy notion that offerings should he seen as inputs in a value-creating process."

Trecho retirado de "Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape" de Richard Normann

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte II)

Parte I.

"Prime Movers, by reconfiguring, draw new boundaries thereby erasing old system definitions. ... moving from narrow and traditional competences to mobilizing broader (and developing new) competences, and from accepting the existing business definitions and rules of the game to imposing new rules of the game that transcend traditional industry boundaries and business system definitions.
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Prime Movership not only as a set of objective, observable behaviors, but also as a mode of being, a mind-set.
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Companies with a strong identification with their product (or production process) rarely become reforming Prime Movers although it is not uncommon for them to think of themselves as such. Those who do typically have a mental orientation more related to a broader notion of value creation. They look at the overall functioning and the larger, overall system in which they themselves are a part. We will refer to this as upframing.
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A company that wants to expand its notion of the Value-creating System in which it works may start by systematically looking at the life cycles of the products and the total value-creation contexts of the customers with which it works.
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A particularly fruitful way of reframing, in our experience, is to focus on the customer of the company as the major stakeholder, and to mentally frame oneself as part of the customer’s business. [Moi ici: Pensar nos inputs em vez de começar pelos outputs] … A major conceptual implication of doing so is to move away from the traditional industrial view of the customer offering as an output of one’s production system to a view in which the customer offering is seen as an input in the customer’s value creating process.  [Moi ici: Tremendo insight!!!] This requires the company to understand the customer’s business and value-creating process and use that as the basic framework within which one defines one’s business."

Tremendo este Richard Normann e o seu "Reframing Business"!!!

Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs

Pessoalmente uso o termo "pivô". Recordar "Primeiro, quem é o pivô da vossa procura?"

"I will reserve the term ‘Prime Movers’ for reconfigurers who do not just base themselves on a historical imperfection, and where the reconfiguration does not only come as a result of technological breakthroughs.
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Prime Movers create cases of reconfiguration which seem to stem from a new design vision of an 'industry' or broader system of value creation. The design vision seldom is clear-cut from the start; rather, it has emergent characteristics. Prime Movers rend to envision a broader Value-creating System (as opposed to a technological innovation, a new product, or the simple exploitation of an economic imperfection) as the outcome of their strategy.
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Prime movers … they move away from focusing on the competences required to manufacture and sell a product to a focus on the much broader set of competences related to the design and functioning of a Value-creating System. [Moi ici: Outra forma de dizer, privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs]
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The Prime Movers listen to the war cries and live up to them in the sense that they have only a limited number of competences and activities inside themselves. Instead, they develop another specific competence, namely the competence to mobilize and manage external actors and their competences which are outside the Prime Mover company.
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While retaining and nurturing their own specific generic competences which they add to the totality of the Value-creating System, each of these Prime Movers adds a unique competence to the whole: a vision-based network pattern, and the ability to actually bring players with disparate assets and competence, together into forming a new, functioning Value-creating System. The end result is that Prime Movers move from focusing on a traditional and narrow (often production- and commodity-based) set of competence, to a much broader and partly new set of competences and users, which they are able to mobilize and coordinate (but not necessarily or even generally own) to that the result becomes a shift of focus from a product or service to a Value-creating System."

Gosto de despertar esta capacidade em empresários e gestores.

Fugir da armadilha afuniladora do "old focus" e abrir a mente para o manancial de oportunidades criativas que se podem abrir com o "new focus".

Ver o mundo através de um novo ponto de vista.

Trechos retirados de "Reframing Business" de Normann

"it took a holistic approach towards how to play"

Retirei a figura que se segue do livro "Reframing Business" de Richard Normann:

Figura fácil de relacionar com esta estória:

"Where to play: Instead of thinking about existing customers, Pro 7 asked itself, who is not buying TV advertising and why not? The answer: Start ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Why don’t they buy? They usually don’t have the money. If they have the money, they don’t want to spend it on something like TV advertising with an uncertain outcome. And even if they were interested in buying TV advertising, they didn’t have the experience and skills to plan and execute a TV media campaign.
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How to play: Instead of simply thinking about how to make the existing product, TV advertising, available to start ups and SMEs, Pro 7 took a more holistic approach, thinking about the products, services, the customer experience, but also the business and revenue models required to turn these noncustomers into customers, while at the same time making sure Pro 7 would not sacrifice its margins. The initial answer was to give away advertising minutes for free and in turn receive a share of the revenues created by its advertising. Along with this new revenue model, Pro 7 took care of media strategy and planning, spot production and execution, offering the new customers a holistic customer experience. Since its origins in 2012, the model has evolved into media-for-revenue-share and media-for-equity, making Pro 7 the first company in the world investing with its media power into start ups.
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How to win: The change in the revenue model occurred only after some time. The initial media-for-revenue-share model made a lot of sense for the customers, but not for Pro 7. Only after offering media-for-equity did the new strategy create value not only for the customers, but also for Pro 7, and other equity partners, who had complained about the revenue-share model, as Pro 7 was taking cash out of the business.
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So in other words, Pro 7 asked about noncustomers and what their barriers to consumption were; it took a holistic approach towards how to play, crafting a comprehensive offering, business model, and revenue model; and it thought about how to create value not only for its customers, but also itself, and its ecosystem partners."

Calçar os sapatos do cliente, ou do não cliente, e ver o mundo pelos seus olhos. O truque é deixar de pensar em despachar os outputs que se produzem e pensar nos inputs na vida do cliente. Como ele pensa, como ele opera, que medos, que preocupações, que aspirações...

Há dias li este trecho:

"Think “input before output”"

E dei-lhe uma outra interpretação, mais em linha com este slide:

 Pensar em output é pensar em despachar o que se produz, o que no limite significa tentar impingir o vómito que se produz, o "old focus" da 1ª figura.

Pensar em input é pensar no "new focus" da 1ª figura e perceber que o que damos numa relação B2B é um input para ser processado na relação que interessa ao cliente, a sua relação com o seu cliente.

Trecho retirado de "What’s the focus of your strategy conversations?"

Olhar para o ecossistema

E volto a "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik para olhar para esta figura.

Várias unidades de negócio da mesma entidade (Scania, a azul).

Compradores do serviço realizado pelos veículos da Scania.

Operadores do serviço realizado pelos veículos da Scania.

Fornecedores e concorrentes de peças para veículos da Scania.

Oficinas que intervêm nos veículos da Scania.

Distribuidores de veículos da Scania e de concorrentes.

Fabricantes de carroçarias.

...

Tal como Normann escreveu...

"take stock of what (one has), yet distance (oneself) from it and explore new territory"

Olhar para o ecossistema actual ou desenhar um ecossistema potencial para subir na escala do valor.

Apostar na densificação

In #complex systems, improving the interactions
between the parts is more important than
improving the parts.
Period.

— Niels Pflaeging (@NielsPflaeging) September 30, 2017

Leio e sorrio...

Ainda ontem numa empresa enquadrei e sublinhei neste âmbito, uma estória que me tinham acabado de contar: cliente que tinha acabado de comprar máquina usada e, ligou a alguém da empresa para que lhe prestassem apoio para a colocar de acordo com o DL 50/2005 (questões de segurança).

Depois, à noite, li um bocadinho de Richard Normann e sublinhei:

"the 'principle of density'. The best combination of resources is mobilized for a particular situation — e.g. for a customer at a given time in a given place — independent of location, to create the optimum value/cost result. 'Density' expresses the degree to which such mobilization of resources for a 'time/space/actor' unit can take place. Offerings can be ever more individualized. [Moi ici: O destino é Mongo]"

Ao final da manhã dei um salto a uma loja iStore para pedir ajuda na aquisição de um acessório para poder trabalhar com um audio e microfone num MacBook Air (que só tem uma entrada para o audio). E a reacção foi: não temos, não vendemos, não é nada connosco.

Empresas que apostam na densificação não pensam só naquilo que se traduz numa venda imediata, pensam em tudo o que podem mobilizar para uma interacção.

"in the real world WOB often shifts faster than WOM"

E eis que chego ao capítulo final de "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik onde apanho:

"Our colleague Richard Normann used to differentiate between World of Business (WOB) concerning the organization's interactions with its external context - and World of Management (WOM), or what happens inside the organization. While in an ideal world WOM supports WOB, in the real world WOB often shifts faster than WOM in established companies and in established societal processes, and WOM becomes a prison or obstacle for new WOB possibilities, preventing WOB to develop as fast as one would hope."

A primeira coisa que me veio à mente foram os números desta tabela:

 E um tweet de Nassim Taleb que vou tentar recuperar:

"The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked."

The clear minded @holland_tom

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) September 5, 2017

Só a PAX ROMANA durou pelo menos 300 anos.

BTW, naquela citação lá em cima acrescentaria o WOG - o World of Government que transmite sinais errados para o WOM e aumenta a descolagem entre o WOB e o WOM até à inevitável derrocada.

Já depois de fechar este postal recomecei a leitura de "Reframing Business - When the Map Changes the Landscape" de Richard Normann onde encontrei:

"As change increasingly comes to characterize the world around us, more often than not the problem is that the dominating ideas reflect a 'reality' of the past, not the 'reality' of the present nor of the future. And sometimes dominating ideas may have been so successful that they are adhered to even though they should really have been abandoned and replaced. Thus, 'the failure of success'. Such misfits between the dominating ideas and an evolving context are often easy to see with hindsight, but we should bear in mind that every reality is open to innumerable interpretations and descriptions, and that in the heat of the moment there are always good reasons for defending many such sets of dominating ideas (as management guru entertainers who sarcastically tell stories about the wrongdoings of managers of earlier eras tend to forget)."

"systems or webs, not as lines or chains"

"Letting go of value as "added" and dropping the view of it arranged along "value chains" has important implications that need to be taken into account for strategists who design configuring offerings as systems of relations, and not as linear ones. ... in a co-creation world, one value manifested in a first interaction would be contingent on how it enables the co-creation of a second value.[Moi ici: O truque que aprendi a usar desde 2004. Para reforçar a co-criação de valor com um cliente, uma PME pode ter de pensar na relação de co-criação de vapor desse cliente com os seus clientes, ou com outros actores com quem interage]

For VCSs operate as systems or webs, not as lines or chains."

Quanto mais um actor trouxer para o ecossistema de criação de valor (VCS) outros actores que co-criam valor e tornam as interacções mais ricas e mais densas, mais valor emerge.

Trechos e imagens retiradas de "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

Uma terceira vez

Ao aproximar-me do final de "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik já decidi. Vou pôr em stand-by o início da leitura da mais recente aquisição, "Value First then Price: Quantifying value in Business to Business markets from the perspective of both buyers and sellers" e vou ler pela terceira vez (a primeira vez em 2008, a segunda vez em 2012) "Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape".

Acho que nunca li um mesmo livro técnico 3 vezes.

O prefácio do livro é de Mintzberg o que é engraçado pois é dele a citação que uso tantas vezes:

Nunca é tarde para aprender, às vezes é demasiado cedo.

Quando li o livro em 2008 apanhei umas pequenas pérolas. Quando o reli em 2012 apanhei e percebi muitas mais coisas.

Espero com a terceira leitura apanhar muito mais e relacionar com mais experiências pessoais e outras leituras feitas entretanto. (Olha, há um tipo que já o leu sete vezes!!!)

O poder da interacção para lidar para com o desconhecido

Mais do que o Big Data, apostar na interacção:

"As opposed to “complicated” systems, where (a) components and and variables, (b) their dimensions, and (c) their purpose in a given system are known; "complex" systems are those in which one or more of (a), (b), and/or (c) is not known.
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Managing complex systems thus requires managing ignorance, which may even include the system's objectives
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One way to address the ignorance that complexity entails is to “engage" counterparts with whom one co-addresses this ignorance. Such engagement connects the managers of these organisations together, … In “engaging with” (as opposed to one actively studying and the "other" being a passively studied), both parties co-explore something as well as each other and each other's way of engaging. In working together, they discover how the differences of how each would engage alone, and when compared, can help each party to ascertain the blind spots it would otherwise keep about a given issue.
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In the management of this multi-relations and multi-role complexity, it must never be forgotten that counterparts themselves have their own agendas."

Trechos retirados de "Strategy for a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

As interacções como a base para a criação de valor

"As business becomes more system-like with "business ecosystems ("BE") ... becoming the norm and  not the exception, value and its production requires more system-like, networked, and emergent conceptual frameworks.
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In the strategy frame we use in this book, we place interactivity as the focus for where value is created and assessed. Interactivity is, of course, also a major source of risk as well of value.
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Our argument is that this central concern with the interactivity that has become so ubiquitous inescapably leads strategists to rethink value creation and strategy.
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Attending interactivity also involves thinking of value as contingent, always located in a setting - no longer as isolated in things or individuals or groups - and dependent on those whom it connects and who co-create it as well as in termos of those it affects positively or negatively.
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patterns of interactivity that enable the production or co-creation of value and values arise or can be designed.[Moi ici: Aquela situação da empresa que toma consciência que está bem e pretende perceber porquê, para fazer batota!!!]
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So perceived patterns of interactivity do not therefore require any intentional design on the part of any particular actor, though they might arise in part because of such intent - and often do arise in this manner in business.
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the notion of value arises for the strategist when one takes the perspective of an actor within a pattern of interaction.
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how actors choose which interactions to privilege over others, and how they relate one interaction to another.[Moi ici: Como não recordar tantos postais deste blogue, como estes de 2007, 2012, 2013 e 2014]
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An organization's managers express its intents - and thus its values - by configuring interactions to establish (more or less) continuing patterns of activity with other actors. Are interactions with employees more important than those with customers? are interactions with shareholders more important than those with employees? For which of these interactions is the strategy primary constructed? These senior managers take views on what possibilities for value co-creation their organization is providing for which actors, and make choices that reflect and reinforce their values.
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We consider this configuring of interactions as a design activity. We use the term Value Creating System (VCS) for the pattern of interactions intentionally configured by the strategic planning carried out by an organization. The designed interactions become manifested as "designed" offerings.
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if the key to creating value is to design and co-create configuring offerings that mobilize others (who may have the role in the interaction of customer or supplier or partner or employee or investor, etc.) to co-create value, then a key source of success is to conceive the VCS and make it work.
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value is not simply "added", but is mutually "created" and "recreated" among actors with different values. These multiple values are "reconciled" or "combined" in co-creating value, and as we shall see bellow, cannot be reduced to a single metric, like the price of a commodity.
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We characterise VCS as designed activities that are part of much broader business ecosystems or business ecologies ("BE")
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we consider strategy as entailing reconfiguring roles, actions and interactions among economic actors through designed configuring offerings that result in a given VCS.
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In co-creation, it is the co-created offerings and the relationships these manifest, not the "business unit" actor, which becomes the central unit of (competitive and collaborative) strategic analysis.
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Designing co-creation requires the strategist having the role of ascertaining and ideally defining the engagement and the dialogue that underpins designing novel and distinctive value creation."

Trechos retirados de "Strategy in a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

BTW, como não recordar Storbacka e Nenonen:

• Não é armadilhar, é criar harmonia, é construir uma sinfonia... 
• Os mercados como configurações (parte III)
• Scripting markets

"Work is interaction"

O marcador "interacção" regista a importância que ao longo dos anos dedico ao poder da interacção como fundamental para a co-criação de valor e diferenciação. Algo que agora encontro em "Strategy for a networked world" de Ramírez & Mannervik.

"The system of skills and responsibilities has been made on the assumption that all that has to be done can be known or forecasted with efficiency and insight.
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In mass-production, work corresponds mainly with what has been planned. But today, in more contextual problem solving, work corresponds mainly with complex engagement with the customer.
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Instead of skills the focus changes to contextual relevance. The most modern definition of work is “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”. Interestingly, cooperation is also described as “an exchange in which the participants benefit from the interaction”.
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Due to the variety of contexts, work requires interpretation, exploration and negotiation. The interpreter is the worker together with the customer, not a manager.[Moi ici: Como não sorrir ironicamente dos morons que se ajoelham perante o bezerro da eficiência e acham que um bot é capaz de co-criar arte com um humano...]
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What defines most problems today is that they are not isolated and independent but connected and systemic. To solve them, a person has to think not only about what he 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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Most decision makers are still unaware of the implications of the complex, responsive properties of the world we live in. Enterprises are not organized to facilitate management of interactions, only the actions of parts taken separately. Even more, compensation structures normally rewards improving the actions of parts, not their interactions.
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To succeed in the new economic spaces we need symmetric relationships and open organizations. When customers are identified as individuals in different use contexts, also the sales process is really a joint process of solving problems. You and your customer necessarily then become cooperators. You are together trying to solve the customer’s problem in a way that both satisfies the customer and ensures a profit for you.
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The industrial make-and-sell model required (explicit) skills as we still know them. The decisive thing was your individual knowledge and individual education. Today, in new economic spaces you work more from your network than your skills. The decisive thing is your network. Work is interaction."

Trechos retirados de "Rethinking skills and responsibility"

O que é um concorrente em Mongo? (parte II)

Parte I.

Agora acabo de ler estes trechos de "Geographic Patterns of Craft Breweries at the Intraurban Scale" de Isabelle Nilsson, Neil Reid & Matthew Lehnert, publicado por The Professional Geographer.

"The emergence, growth, and success of the craft brewing industry are a David versus Goliath story.
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as an industry takes on an oligopolistic structure, it often produces an increasingly homogeneous product (American pale lager) that depends on economies of scale in production, marketing, and distribution to perpetuate its success. Although American pale lager has historically satisfied the palates of most Americans, there emerged a growing segment of the population that preferred craft beer. Craft beer drinkers prefer craft over mass-produced beer for a number of reasons, including its greater variety in terms of styles and flavors; the independent, local, and small-scale nature of craft breweries; and the innovative nature of the industry, which means that there are always new beers to sample. The growing popularity of locally produced craft beer mirrors what has happened in other food- and drink-related sectors; witness the increasing number of farmers markets and wineries across the country.
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Early craft beer drinkers have been referred to as insurgents or rebels, who identified a “hot cause”—a desire for more choice in terms of taste, quality, and styles of beer. Hot causes, however, require “cool mobilization”; that is, someone must engage in actions that challenge the status quo and turn desire into reality.
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Home brewing clubs provided a venue where individuals could hone their skills, experiment with new recipes, and share ideas with fellow enthusiasts. The clubs were critical in developing the culture of collaboration that is a cornerstone of the industry today. They also became the places where the seeds of revolution were sown, a revolution that manifest itself when, one by one, some home brewers decided to commercialize their hobby. Collaboration was particularly valuable for the early home and commercial craft brewers, as there existed only a small number of books on the brewing process. Hence, home brewing clubs became places where knowledge was traded and collective learning occurred. Home brewing clubs were akin to communities of practice. They were also places where tacit knowledge, such as demonstrating how to make and use brewing equipment, was exchanged."

Quando ontem à noite em "Strategy For a Networked World" de Ramírez & Mannervik li:

"Collaboration is at Least as Important as Competition
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in the VCS aproach to strategy, collaboration is at least as important as competition. The decisive strength lies in how well the interactions within the VCS enable values to be co-created, i.e. on how well the actors collaborate, and how capable they are to attract and keep actors to collaborate with. This means that the roles they are offered in a VCS have to be attractive.
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It follows that the ability to invite, interest, enroll, and mobilize others into one's VCS is more important than focusing on competing with opponents who provide similar products or services and have designed competing VCS.
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competing organizations also can engage each other in collaboration to achieve a common value.
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Collaboration helps the pie to get bigger for everyone; competition is about what size of a given pie one might take.[Moi ici: Este trecho é certeiro!]
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The VCS framework invites and allows a focus on how to come together to "make the pie bigger", enabling better, and more varied types of value to be co-created among actors, by actors, and with and for other actors - jointly."

E:

"In a networked world, co-designed configuring offerings imply that strategy is as important in terms of collaborative advantage as it is in terms of competitive advantage - perhaps even more so. It is a world of business where those who design offerings with others create better design and value than others who do not collaborate in the designing."

Sorrio com ironia - go ahed morons (parte II)

Já depois de ter escrito a parte I dou de caras com este artigo, "The Tragic Crash of Flight AF447 Shows the Unlikely but Catastrophic Consequences of Automation":

"Our research, recently published in Organization Science, examines how automation can limit pilots’ abilities to respond to such incidents, as becoming more dependent on technology can erode basic cognitive skills.
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Automation provides massive data-processing capacity and consistency of response. However, it can also interfere with pilots’ basic cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting, which is fundamental to control and learning. If it results in less active monitoring and hands-on engagement, pilots’ situational awareness and capacity to improvise when faced with unexpected, unfamiliar events may decrease. This erosion may lie hidden until human intervention is required, for example when technology malfunctions or encounters conditions it doesn’t recognize and can’t process.
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This idea – that the same technology that allows systems to be efficient and largely error-free also creates systemic vulnerabilities that result in occasional catastrophes – is termed “the paradox of almost totally safe systems.” This paradox has implications for technology deployment in many organizations, not only safety-critical ones.
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As automation has increased in complexity and sophistication, so have the conditions under which such handovers are likely to occur. Is it reasonable to expect startled and possibly out-of-practice humans to be able to instantaneously diagnose and respond to problems that are complex enough to fool the technology? This issue will only become more pertinent as automation further pervades our lives, for example as autonomous vehicles are introduced to our roads.
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Organizations must now consider the interplay of different types of risk. More automation reduces the risk of human errors, most of the time, as shown by aviation’s excellent and improving safety record. But automation also leads to the subtle erosion of cognitive abilities that may only manifest themselves in extreme and unusual situations."

E embora use essa metáfora muitas vezes, liderar uma empresa não é escolher um destino e um caminho. Durante a viagem o destino ou o caminho podem deixar de fazer sentido.

Sorrio com ironia - go ahed morons

Há dias numa empresa, a propósito da cláusula da comunicação da ISO 9001, conversava sobre o que é uma boa comunicação interna.

Por vezes encontro empresas que tratam os seus trabalhadores humanos como seres racionais e ponto.  Ou seja, não basta enviar um e-mail a avisar que foi aprovada uma metodologia de tratamento de reclamações e que os envolvidos devem revê-la para estarem preparados para o seu uso.

Os humanos não são como a personagem Spock que tem a lógica como critério único de actuação. Os humanos são muito mais complexos. Por isso, também, não há dois humanos iguais.

Recordo a cena de dois adultos, de boa-fé, perante os mesmos factos poderem agir de forma distinta.

Os humanos valorizam, dão crédito a quem os compreende naquilo que é irracional, ou meta-lógico.

A maioria dos humanos são satisficers, como os nabateus, e não maximizadores. Os maximizadores tramam-se quando os sistemas não são lineares e têm uma zona côncava, os maximizadores são fragilistas por excelência.

Quando era miúdo pedi aos meus pais que comprassem um livro gigante e colorido chamado "A História do Homem nos Últimos 2 Milhões de Anos". O género Homo pode andar por cá há cerca de 2 milhões de anos, mas trazemos connosco material genético que evolui há vários milhares de milhões de anos.  Ao longo desses milhares de milhões de anos a evolução dotou-nos de uma série de  enviesamentos com o fito não de conhecermos a realidade como ela é mas o de sobrevivermos para deixar descendência.

Por tudo isto, ao ler "AI May Soon Replace Even the Most Elite Consultants" fico com um sorriso de ironia. É certo que há muitos campos em que a Inteligência Artificial vai ajudar a tomar decisões, a perceber o que se encontra por trás de paletas e resmas de dados. No entanto, julgo que é algo simplista acreditar que uma boa decisão só se baseia em análise quantitativa. A minha velha recordação da luta entre MacGiver e Sandy e esta outra mais recente:

"Há meses CEO disse a propósito de um procedimento para validação de investimentos na sua empresa:
- Se perguntar ao meu pai porque optou há 8 anos por investir uma pipa de massa numa máquina fora da caixa, quando o mercado estava em crise, e que agora dá-nos o pão nosso de cada dia, ele diria que  "teve um feeling"."

Ainda ontem li em "Strategy for a Networked World":

"Qualitative analysis is at least as important as quantitative analysis in understanding a value creating system design and/or how its design emerged" 

Como se tudo se resumisse à incapacidade do processador da informação, como se não houvesse genuína incerteza na realidade:

‘invites us to abandon the utopia of a single-natured universe . . . and to be clairvoyant about the structural difficulties we encounter when we critically open the possibility of a game entailing different natures’ 

Trecho encontrado em "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999)

Parece que voltamos a Einstein, Schrödinger e Heisenberg e à discussão sobre a natureza determinista ou não do universo.

Se acredito no que citei aqui sobre a natureza do valor só posso acreditar na importância crescente da arte, da interacção, da humanidade à medida que Mongo se impõe. Por isso, sorrio com ironia pelos que confiam demasiado em algo analítico ... recomendo a leitura do Livro do Eclesiastes.

Apetece dizer:

Go ahead punk moron fragilistas make my day!

Acerca do valor

"consider value creation as synchronic and interactive, not linear and transitive. Customers in this alternative view create value, they do not destroy it. Value is not simply ‘added,’ but is mutually ‘created’ and ‘re-created’ among actors with different values. These multiple values are ‘reconciled’ or ‘combined’ in co-producing value and, as we shall see below, cannot be reduced to a single metric.
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Empirical research shows that how an elicitor poses the problem affects the values which judgements appear to express. Values are thus contingent, more than subjective. They do not reside ‘in’ an individual, independent of his actual actions, nor ‘in’ a good, independent of the interactions to which it is subjected."

E pensar nos que querem automatizar contactos, que querem bots, que querem relações eficientes...

Trechos retirados de "Value Co-production: Intelectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research" de Rafael Ramirez, publicado por Strategic Management Journal, 20: 49–65 (1999)