Nash Equilibrium and Mongo

Oiço a explicação de Nash e visualizo a minha descrição de Mongo!

Acerca de Mongo:

• Criatividade e Mongo
• 1 Origem de uma metáfora
• Mongo é inevitável

O mundo é um lugar heterogéneo (Mongo)

Uma das citações na coluna das mesmas é:

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

 Algo que escrevi aqui no blogue pela primeira vez em 2013.

Penso:

• nas televisões a cores que não mataram as televisões a preto e branco;
• nos discos de vinil;
• nas cassestes audio;
• nos filmes a preto e branco;
• nos catálogos em papel;
• nos jogos de tabuleiro;
• nas livrarias independentes.

Agora descubro, "When firms may benefit from sticking with an old technology":

"In some markets, the rise of a discontinuous technology, besides posing a substitute threat to the old technology, further exposes niche segments where customers continue to favor the old technology. This paper predicts that within such a market, as competitors increasingly adopt the new technology for varied motives, firms sticking with the old technology may see their performance declining before rebounding and potentially reaching new heights.

...

this paper further emphasizes the importance of attending to the inherent heterogeneity of a demand context in analyzing the dynamics of technological change and its performance implications at both the market and firm levels. Such demand heterogeneity, due to varied sources, may preserve niche opportunities in a market for an old technology, preventing it from complete displacement by the new technology. This subsequently makes it possible for firms sticking with the old technology to thrive for an unexpectedly long period despite the rise of a new technology with superior functionality."

O mundo é como o planeta Mongo, uma paisagem muito enrugada.  

Num cenário polarizado ...

Há muitos anos que aqui no blogue, praticamente desde a primeira hora, escrevo sobre a importância de seleccionar os clientes-alvo e trabalhar para eles. Por exemplo, em 2006 escrevia sobre o perigo de ser uma Arca de Noé:

• Deixar de ser uma Arca de Noé
• Porque não podemos ser uma Arca de Noé!

A reforçar esta mensagem de focalização nos clientes-alvo, tenho desenvolvido aqui também a metáfora de Mongo, um mundo pleno de variedade e de tribos numa paisagem enrugada:

• 1 Origem de uma metáfora
• Criatividade e Mongo
• Covid, empresas, estratégias e paisagens enrugadas

Às vezes criticam-me porque supostamente no mundo actual as empresas tanto podem servir em simultâneo gregos como troianos. No entanto, continuo na minha, ainda na semana passada li, "Why Mushroom Leather (and Other New Materials) Are Struggling to Scale":

"Compare the number of venture capital firms funding software to the number of venture firms specialising in material innovation or fashion. There are far fewer.

The reasons for the chasm are structural. Once a software solution is invented, the marginal cost to distribute the second, third and one millionth sale are close to zero. By contrast, once a new material is invented, the marginal costs for subsequent units are nearly the same. It is only with learning and scale that costs begin to decrease.

At the same time, building the capacity to produce new materials often requires considerable capital expenditure to build out infrastructure."

Entretanto, ontem li "The Myth of the Mainstream":

"Chasing the mass market is a losing proposition for marketers in a polarized culture. Allying with the subculture that loves you is the best way to drive brand success.

...

For years, McDonald's seemed to embody everything that was wrong with the American diet. The brand had become a symbol of food choices that were driving escalating rates of obesity and hypertension.

The company spent more than a decade trying to fight this perception among American consumers by targeting them with messaging about its updated menu, which offered healthier alternatives more in line with contemporary diet trends - but to no avail. Year over year, McDonald's sales declined, and its brand perception continued to spiral downward.

...

Finally, the company decided to go on the offensive. Instead of combating the opposition's hate and attempting to win over those in the middle, McDonald's decided to focus on its fans - the people who self-identify as McDonald's devotees despite the vitriol directed at the brand. 

...

In doing so, it tapped into what these devotees love about McDonald's and not only activated their collective consumption but also inspired them to spread the word on behalf of the brand. The result of this strategy was a 10.4% increase in global revenue for McDonald's from 2018 to 2021 and the return of dormant customers: more than a quarter of those who came in to buy the Travis Scott meal, for example, hadn't visited the chain in over a year. Seemingly overnight, McDonald's went from being a cautionary tale to the darling of brand marketing and a case study for advertising effectiveness.

If you want to get people to move, you must choose a side. The notion that you can win by playing to the middle is a misleading myth.

What's going on here? Conventional wisdom would tell us that in a world of increasingly polarized opinions, our best bet is to appease the middle, if only because that's where the majority of the market is. That also seems like a safe bet to many companies, as a middle-of-the-road position is less likely to alienate potential customers.

...

The middle doesn't adopt new products with any urgency. They are not the first to respond to marketing communications, nor are they likely to weigh in on a debate between advocates and detractors. They mitigate their own risk of moving out of step with what might be considered generally acceptable by stepping back and observing other people's responses first.

The red herring is that we perceive this indifference as an opportunity to persuade them to one side or the other. But the truth is, they are not typically convinced by any marketing communications. Instead, they, too, take cues from other people - sometimes those who are for you, and at other times those who are against you.

Our chances of successfully influencing behavior increases when we choose to address the people who are most likely to take action.

With this in mind, it becomes abundantly clear that in a polarized scenario, the chances of marketers getting people to move are far greater when we activate the collective of the willing as opposed to trying to convince detractors or even persuade the indifferent."

Sobre a polarização do mercado, recordo Polarização do mercado ou como David e Golias podem co-existir. 

Mais uma vez, biologia e economia

"Interestingly, recent research in evolutionary biology has direct relevance for understanding how some organizations survive over time and others fail. [Moi ici: O nosso velho "a economia é a continuação da biologia"] At its heart, evolution refers to change or transformation over time. Natural selection refers to the process where, over time, favorable traits (traits useful for survival) become more common and unfavorable traits become less prevalent. In commenting on this, David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, noted that "natural selection is based on the relationship between an organism and its environment, regardless of its taxonomic identity."  Thus, it can readily apply to organizations as well as birds, insects, slime mold, and humans.

The three major underpinnings of evolutionary theory are variation (organisms or organizations differ on traits), selection (these differences sometimes make a difference in the organisms ability to survive), and retention (these useful characteristics can be passed from one generation to another). As environments change over time, the variation in traits can make organisms more or less fit, such that the former are more likely to survive. [Moi ici: A tal paisagem competitiva enrugada que se mexe] As organizations compete and struggle for existence, they clearly vary in ways that make some more competitive than others. Fitness in this case is not the reproductive success of biology but the ability to attract resources (physical, financial, and intellectual). [Moi ici: Recordo "What was the best strategy in the end?"] Less fit organisms die. Thus, survival at the organizational level is a function of the process of variation and selection occurring across business units and the ability of senior management to regulate this process in a way that maintains the ecological fitness of the organization with its environment. [Moi ici: Por isto, o team da caridadezinha, os trabalhadores não tomam este tipo de decisões] This process does not imply random variation but a deliberate approach to variation, selection, and retention that uses existing firm assets and capabilities and reconfigures them to address new opportunities."

Trecho retirado de "Lead and disrupt: how to solve the innovator's dilemma" de Charles A O' Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman.  

Escalar montanhas

Ontem o dia começou com a revisão dos e-mails recebidos durante a noite. Um deles remetia-me para um artigo que comentei em Maio de 2021 no postal, "duas economias, diferentes realidades, diferentes meios de competir ou não competir" (parte II), o artigo é ""Competition on Rugged Landscapes: The Dynamics of Product Positioning" de Leon Zucchini."

Como escrevi aqui:

"Usar uma paisagem enrugada para explicar comportamentos observados no mercado é um clássico neste blogue."

Entretanto, durante a caminhada matinal comecei a leitura de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt. Como começa o livro? Como uma reflexão acerca da observação de gente a escalar uma parede nua só com as mãos.

"Climbers call such boulders “problems” and describe the toughest part as “the crux.” In the case of the Cul de Chien, you cannot get up with just strength or ambition. You have to solve the puzzle of the crux and have the courage to make delicate moves almost two stories above the ground.

...

The first climber said that he chooses the climb having the greatest expected reward and whose crux he believes he can solve. In a flash of insight, I realize this describes the approaches of many of the more effective people I have known and observed. Whether facing problems or opportunities, they focused on the way forward promising the greatest achievable progress—the path whose crux was judged to be solvable.

I began to use the term crux to denote the outcome of a three-part strategic skill. The first part is judgment about which issues are truly important and which are secondary. The second part is judgment about the difficulties of dealing with these issues. And the third part is the ability to focus, to avoid spreading resources too thinly, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on the crux—the most important part of a set of challenges that is addressable, having a good chance of being solved by coherent action.

As with climbers, every person, every company, every agency faces both opportunities and obstacles to their progress. Yes, we all need motivation, ambition, and strength. But, by themselves, they are not enough. To deal with a set of challenges, there is power in locating your crux—where you can gain the most by designing, discovering, or finding a way to move through and past it."

Covid, empresas, estratégias e paisagens enrugadas

Há anos que uso e abuso da metáfora das paisagens enrugadas para falar de Mongo:

• A paisagem enrugada
• Ilustração da narrativa de Mongo (Parte II)
• OMG... e vão viver de quê? (parte VIII) ou Mt 11, 25
• O modelo NK de Kauffman - uma introdução
• Acerca da Totoestratégia

Quando falamos de paisagens enrugadas também faz sentido falar da entropia, e dos constrangimentos do passado sobre as possibilidades do futuro, o espaço de Minkowsky. Por exemplo, O paradoxo da estratégia (parte II: As posições anteriores limitam as posições futuras).

Entretanto, ontem li este artigo "Evolution 'Landscapes' Predict What's Next for COVID Virus":

"Scientists have been able to make these discoveries by revisiting a concept proposed almost a century ago — fitness (or adaptive) landscapes — with modern technologies. They can use fitness landscapes to quantify the relationship between changes to the viral genome and its ability to replicate and infect a new host. The topographic maps representing that relationship can help to reconstruct the virus’s history, and they could also at least potentially predict its future.

...

fitness landscapes are an invaluable way to connect genotype [Moi ici: O material "genético" das empresas] to phenotype [Moi ici: O meio ambiente]. 

...

What results is a landscape with a unique topography, explains Adam Lauring, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan Medical School. If the mapped variants don’t differ much in their impact on fitness, then the landscape looks fairly flat, much like Nebraska. Variants with large effects on fitness create a landscape that more closely resembles the towering hoodoos of Bryce Canyon in Utah. Natural selection favors the variants on peaks: The average genotype or phenotype of a species should evolve by moving from one peak to the next, ideally along a ridge between them rather than through the valleys. (Isolated subpopulations with different genotypes can also help a species find its way over a gap.)

“If you move a few feet, you’re going to fall off, and getting up again is getting very hard,” Lauring said. “There are fewer pathways to move around.”[Moi ici: O espaço de Minkowsky]

“The theory is very straightforward. You just need to know your genotype, and then you measure the fitness and you can basically predict anything that might happen,”

...

“We’re the environment for the virus,” Lauring said. “If we change, the landscape changes.”"

Fazer o paralelismo com as empresas.

Clientes versus concorrentes

Há dias citei aqui e comentei:

It is axiomatic that a first step in a firm's formulation of competitive strategy is the identification of its major competitors (e.g., Porter, 1980). [Moi ici: Não penso assim, não sigo este axioma. Tenho receio dos Dick Dastardly desta vida, e dos motards. Prefiro imaginar uma paisagem competitiva cheia de picos. Prefiro começar por determinar quem são os clientes-alvo e qual o ecossistema que deve ser mobilizado para os seduzir, satisfazer e desenvolver]

Entretanto, ontem li "Research in Cognition and Strategy: Reflections on Two Decades of Progress and a Look to the Future" de Sarah Kaplan e publicado no Journal of Management Studies 48:3 May 2011, e voltei a pensar no mesmo tema. A autora faz um trabalho muito interessante a descrever a evolução da investigação sobre as categorias de conhecimento. Outra vez um foco na categorização dos concorrentes. Por exemplo:

"Firms from other parts of the UK and other countries, even if they produced fully-fashioned knitwear at similar price points, were seen as being in different businesses or only ‘somewhat’ competitors

...

‘Cognitive oligopolies’ exist because competitors define each other as such.

...

They showed that managers based their categorization of competitors on a hierarchical understanding of the product offerings

...

Managers of larger hotels categorized competitors over a wider range of prices than did those of small hotels

...

The Scottish knitwear study showed how the categorization of different competitors as direct rivals affected the strategic choices and actions of firms."

Enquanto lia isto pensava em como seria se os autores citados tivesse optado por trabalhar com base na categorização dos clientes. À noite fui à minha biblioteca e saquei o meu velho "Managing for Results" de Peter Drucker, publicado em 1986 e fui ao capítulo 6, "The Customer Is the Business" ... continua tão actual e tão fresco:

"Business is a process which converts a resource, distinct knowledge, into a contribution of economic value in the marketplace. The purpose of a business is to create a customer. [Moi ici: O propósito não é o de ganhar aos concorrentes] The purpose is to provide something for which an independent outsider, who can choose not to buy, is willing to exchange his purchasing power. And knowledge alone  (excepting only the case of the complete monopoly) gives the products of any business that leadership position on which success and survival ultimately depend.

...

1. What the people in the business think they know about customer and market is more likely to be wrong than right. There is only one person who really knows: the customer. Only by asking the customer, by watching him, by trying to understand his behavior can one find out who he is, what he does, how he buys, how he uses what he buys, what he expects, what he values, and so on.

2. The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, of course, that nobody pays for a “product.” What is paid for is satisfactions. But nobody can make or supply satisfactions as such—at best, only the means to attaining them can be sold and delivered.

...

3. A corollary is that the goods or services which the manufacturer sees as direct competitors rarely adequately define what and whom he is really competing with. They cover both too much and too little.

...

Because the customer buys satisfaction, all goods and services compete intensively with goods and services that look quite different, seem to serve entirely different functions, are made, distributed, sold differently—but are alternative means for the customer to obtain the same satisfaction.

...

5. The customers have to be assumed to be rational. But their rationality is not necessarily that of the manufacturer; it is that of their own situation."

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia

Quem conhece este blogue já sabe que há muitos anos escrevo sobre o eficientismo, escrevo sobre o denominador, escrevo sobre aquilo a que chamo a doença ango-saxónica.

Sobre a doença anglo-saxónica recordo, por exemplo:

• "Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica" (Agosto de 2019)
• "A doença anglo-saxónica" (Julho de 2019)
• "o choque com a teimosia anglo-saxónica de continuar a acreditar no século XX: eficiência, volume, escala, custo." (Junho de 2017)
• "Esta ideia da concorrência perfeita tornou-se no modelo mental da gestão anglo-saxónica que permeia e molda o pensamento dos autores da narrativa oficial, aqui e no resto do mundo." (Fevereiro de 2014)

O paradigma desta doença é Kevin O'Leary.

Sobre o eficientismo recordo, por exemplo:

• Fragilidade, flexibilidade, futuro e eficiência (Novembro de 2019)
• Contra o Evangelho do Eficientismo (Março de 2016)

Não posso listar um décimo dos postais que escrevi sobre estes temas, apenas recordo mais um. O título que se segue lista o vocabulário clássico usado neste blogue acerca do tema: "profecia fácil do "hollowing", ou "radioclubização", de como uma marca forte e genuína se transforma numa carcaça, num aristocrata arruinado, fruto de deixarem os muggles à solta" (Fevereiro de 2019)

O contrário da doença anglo-saxónica é seguir a via de Mongo. Em "Acerca do eficientismo", um postal de Dezembro de 2018, relaciono tudo isto, voltando a um postal de Dezembro de 2011, "Estranhistão ... weirdistão" e a outro de Agosto de 2011 sobre a sabedoria nabateia.

Por que recordo tudo isto?

Ontem à noite, já deitado, dei uma última vista de olhos pela minha timeline do Twitter e encontrei:

My new @washingtonpost editorial. The virus shows that making our companies efficient also made our country weak https://t.co/OKvzqd96sR More to come in my Sep 2020 book: When More is not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

— Roger L. Martin (@RogerLMartin) March 27, 2020

Alguns sublinhados do artigo:

"Efficiency is an unforgiving master. It crushes everything not in service of an immediate bottom line. But if there is a single economic policy lesson to learn from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that the United States’ obsession with efficiency over the past half-century has brutally undermined its capacity to deal with such a catastrophic event.
.
Efficiency requires us to force out duplication and redundancy, increase specialization and more seamlessly connect things together. Resilience, on the other hand, enables us to adapt to changes in our environment. Efficiency and resilience are opposing forces in our economy, and the pandemic has shown us the high price we are paying for the modern focus on efficiency at the expense of resilience"

Como não recuar ao meu mágico Verão de 2008, mágico porque aprendi tanta coisa que influenciou o meu trabalho até hoje:

Quanto mais pura é uma estratégia, maior rentabilidade se pode obter, mas também maior o risco, e menor a flexibilidade, e maior a taxa de mortalidade se o mundo mudar rapidamente. Daí a importância de uma floresta de estratégias diversificadas a que chamo Mongo, um mundo de inúmeros picos na paisagem competitiva enrugada:

Daí o meu fascínio por um artigo de 2007 que citei pela primerira vez aqui em "O Grande Planeador, o Grande Geómetra, já era!":

"Life is the most resilient thing on the planet. It has survived meteor showers, seismic upheavals, and radical climate shifts. And yet it does not plan, it does not forecast, and, except when manifested in human beings, it possesses no foresight. So what is the essential thing that life teaches us about resilience?
Just this: Variety matters. Genetic variety, within and across species, is nature's insurance policy against the unexpected. A high degree of biological diversity ensures that no matter what particular future unfolds, there will be at least some organisms that are well-suited to the new circumstances."

Cuidado com os arautos de um novo socialismo, cuidado com os defensores de um governo mundial: o CyberSyn só nos trará a venezuelização como destino final.

Voltando ao artigo de Roger Martin:

"Third, by spreading so quickly, this pandemic has already illustrated the downside of our seamlessness in travel and trade. Early on in this pandemic, complete travel bans were seen as overly disruptive and draconian. For the future, we need to accept that the timely imposition of travel restrictions, within and across countries, is a powerful and necessary weapon, and adjust our travel expectations accordingly.
.
All these measures would introduce productive friction into a system that has been developed over 50 years to be as ruthlessly efficient as possible. As this pandemic has shown us, we need to value other qualities such as redundancy and buffers, if we are to tackle the next catastrophic event."

Daqui ressalta a importância da proximidade, outro tema desenvolvido ao longo dos anos aqui no blogue. Daqui ressalta a importância que a União Europeia como espaço económico comum representa para este pais socialista, pobre (sim, eu sei é uma redundância), envelhecido e dominado por instituições extractivas.

Basta olhar para esta tabela, retirada do dossiê sobre Portugal no World Footwear Yearbook Snapshot 2017

Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos exportado de Portugal? 26,09 USD
Qual o preço médio de um par de sapatos importado para Portugal? 11,69 USD

Mais uma vez, cuidado com os "bicicletas" deste mundo, autênticos Sarumans nas suas torres de marfim, sem noção do que é a realidade da vida micro-económica, mas sempre dispostos a agir como governantes iluminados que sabem melhor do que nós próprios o que é melhor para nós. Convido à leitura desta série de quatro postais de Outubro de 2015 que ilustram factualmente a ignorância dessa gente.

Como diz o grande Nassim Taleb: Intelectuals Yet Idiots.

Portanto, cuidado com pedintes que ameaçam sair da União Europeia se não lhes derem o dinheiro para continuar o deboche que nos tem trazido até aqui, um país político que gasta tanto tempo e energia a discutir como distribuir a riqueza e não se preocupa em como facilitar a sua criação .

A paisagem pode ser modificada pelas empresas

Demasiadas vezes olhamos para a paisagem competitiva como uma constante do desafio.
Na verdade, a paisagem competitiva não é um dado constante. Ela está sempre a mudar. Ainda ontem a notícia sobre a taxa de 25% que os EUA vão aplicar sobre as importações de queijo e fruta, representa uma alteração da paisagem imposta por agentes muito poderosos.
O que esquecemos muitas vezes é que as próprias empresa podem agir, elas próprias, para alterar a paisagem competitiva onde actuam.

"For purposes of understanding shaping in strategy, the idea that organisms can alter their selection environments and those of their descendants has obvious appeal.
...
In biology, organisms shape elements of the selection environment that affect survival. But in strategy, firms generally have a different proximate goal—they seek profits—and they take action directed toward this goal. Thus, for firms, the relevant selection criteria are those that determine profits and payoffs to specific courses of action.We can think of the selection criteria for profit-seeking firms as encoded in the payoff structure that maps particular firm actions or decisions or attributes (e.g., activities, resources, and capabilities) to the payoffs that ensue. In this sense, shaping the selection environment in strategy means shaping the payoff structure for all firms operating in that environment. In NK terms, firms generate or modify the “fitness function,” which lies behind the topology of the fitness landscape that all firms climb in search of profit opportunities. Similarly, in the context of strategic interactions, shaping the business context means that a firm or firms playing a competitive game endogenously generate or modify the payoff structure for all firms in the game, such as by altering the payoffs to particular moves or the types of moves available.
...
1. Shaping can have major direct effects on the performance of a shaper and its position on the business landscape, i.e., its competitive advantage.
2. As a corollary, shaping can also have direct implications for the competitive advantage of competitors. In addition to improving the focal firm’s position, shaping can directly undermine other firms’ positions on the landscape by affecting the bases of their competitive advantage.
3. Highly malleable business landscapes may hide subtle dangers for shapers because high malleability leads to more frequent shaping. Although firms may be individually rational when shaping the business context in an effort to improve their performance, their independent actions may collectively lead to overshaping and long-run instability in performance for all firms.
4. Overshaping is not independent of the number of firms of the shaping type in the population. Unless shaping involves joint action by a group of firms (a case that the model does not contemplate), ceteris paribus the fewer the number of shapers, the greater the benefits from shaping activity.
5. The sustainability of competitive advantage is likely to be highest in situations of moderate to high complexity (K) combined with a low to moderate number of dimensions available for shaping (E). Under these conditions, any advantage obtained through shaping is less likely to be undermined by shaping on the part of other firms and is more likely to be sustained due to complexity."

Trechos retirados de "Searching, Shaping, and the Quest for Superior Performance" de Giovanni Gavetti, Constance E. Helfat e Luigi Marengo, publico por Strategy Science, Volume 2, Issue 3, September 2017, Pages ii, 141-209

Acerca da doença anglo-saxónica

Há anos que escrevo aqui no blogue sobre Mongo.
Já usei esse marcador 1347 vezes, a primeira em Agosto de 2010.
A primeira vez que usei essa metáfora aqui no blogue foi em Novembro de 2007 com "A cauda longa e o planeta Mongo".

No mundo em que trabalho vejo cada vez mais exemplos de empresas que seguem o caminho de Mongo porque é uma boa alternativa para fugir do embate directo com os gigantes que competem pela eficiência. Como escrevo aqui há milhares de anos, competir pelo preço não é para quem quer, é para quem pode. E quase nenhuma PME pode. [Recordar Agosto de 2006]

Seguir o caminho de Mongo é também uma boa opção para subir na escala de valor, aproveitar o poder do numerador, praticar o Evangelho do Valor e aumentar a produtividade muito mais do que só com base no denominador.

O meu mundo profissional não costuma ser o mundo das empresas grandes, das empresas cotadas na bolsa e das empresas com accionistas de curto-prazo. Esse outro mundo onde raramente entro é um mundo que vejo como dominado por uma doença, a doença anglo-saxónica (Fevereiro de 2014 e Julho de 2019). Só conhecem a eficiência para aumentar a produtividade, não sabem que a criatividade é muito mais eficaz a consegui-lo. Pensam que a paisagem competitiva continua a ser a da figura da esquerda quando estamos cada vez mais na da direita:

Conhecem Kevin O'Leary? Ele é o paradigma da doença amplo-saxónica, produto do século XX. (Atenção ao post scrcriptum no final deste postal)

Este mês de Agosto tem sido fértil em leituras sobre esta temática, mas sobre o ponto de vista de quem trabalha sobretudo com empresas grandes. Por exemplo, esta manhã li "Reflections of a business guru":

"The experience led him to reflect on the “curse of efficiency”. Organisations focus so much on efficiency that they fail to be effective. [Moi ici: Isto até arrepia de tão em linha com a comparação que costumamos fazer aqui entre eficácia e eficiência Eficácia, eficiência, e produtividade e Apostar no numerador, no valor e não no lápis vermelho (parte II)] Instead of concentrating on their core goal, they pay attention to narrower measures like cutting costs, or reducing the inconvenience suffered by their staff. Examples of the problem can be found in many places."

Mas a lista é longa, por exemplo:

• Reli "Rethinking Efficiency" que já comentei aqui "Acerca do eficientismo" (Dezembro de 2018)
• How Serious Are You About "Shareholder Value Is Not Everything"?
• Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say
• Reli "Managing for the Long Term"
• General Electric: US giant hits back over $38bn fraud claim

Já por várias vezes tive discordâncias no Twitter com gente da minha área política porque para eles o grande objectivo é que as empresas tenham lucro. Para mim, ter lucro é uma consequência não o objectivo. Para mim, ter lucro é uma condição de sobrevivência não a razão de ser de um negócio. Aquilo a que John Kay chama de obliquity.

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte III)

Parte I e Parte II.

"The decision of where on the landscape firms should position their products is at the core of product positioning. By deciding what attributes to include in the product and what uses of the product to promote, firms guide the customers’ understanding of the new product’s comparison set, i.e., the appropriate demand landscape for the product. Firms’ emphasis on a subset of product attributes helps the customers determine the product’s location on the relevant demand landscape and the customers’ WTP for the product.
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Competitor products can serve as referents for the introduction of new products and repositioning of existing products. Depending on the competitors’ positioning in relation to the customers’ ideal points, firms may pursue either differentiation or imitation strategies.
...
Four conditions are useful for thinking about how firms decide when to move on the demand landscape and when to reshape the landscape: weak connection between product attributes and performance, large number of attributes used by the customer to evaluate products, opportunity for collective action, and fragmentation of buyers and suppliers. Both firms that are constrained in their product-attribute choices and firms that have exhausted their repertoires of product modification options can pursue profits by attempting to change the shape of their demand landscapes.
...
Firms that are limited in their product modification options, e.g., generic drug manufacturers, may be especially likely to turn to landscape-shaping strategies in order to promote their products."

Trecho retirado de  "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products". 

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte II)

Parte I.

"A long-standing tradition in strategy conceptualizes the firm's operating environment as a fitness landscape. In this conceptualization, the firm’s performance is an outcome of searching the landscape for an optimal position. ... More recent contributions to this literature put forward the possibility of firms not just searching a landscape shaped by other actors, but also reshaping the landscape, i.e., changing the topology of the landscape to improve a focal firm’s position on the landscape and, with it, the firm’s performance. This suggestion expands the repertoire of strategies available to firms.
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To date the research on demand landscapes has taken the shape of the landscape as a given, implicitly assuming that firms operate on exogenously determined landscapes (i.e., firms’ only option is to change products to accommodate customer preferences). Taking a different perspective, I propose that firms can reshape the demand landscapes for their products (i.e., change customer preferences to accommodate their products).
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I consider two approaches to landscape reshaping by firms—1) moving the customer’s ideal point and 2) manipulating the customer’s perception of the distance between the customer’s ideal point and the firm’s product.
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My starting point is the demand landscape —a concept that describes the distribution of customer preferences in terms of customers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for different combinations of product attributes. ... In my conceptualization, the demand landscape represents a mapping from product attribute combinations (product positions) to customers’ WTP for these combinations."

Trecho retirado de  "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products".

"Re‐shaping demand landscapes" (Parte I)

Usar uma paisagem enrugada para explicar comportamentos observados no mercado é um clássico neste blogue.

Por exemplo, recordar "Acerca da Totoestratégia" de Julho de 2012 ou "O modelo NK de Kauffman - uma introdução" de Dezembro de 2010:

Empresas que procuram subir na paisagem competitiva em busca de melhores retornos ou menos ameaças e que têm de estar alerta porque, quando menos se espera, o espaço onde se movem altera-se, e a posição onde se aterra pode significar a morte, ou pelos menos muita dor.

Depois, com Nenonen e Storbacka, assume-se que as empresas podem ser elas próprias a alterar a paisagem competitiva em seu benefício. Os mercados não são, vão sendo "markets are not – they become" de Março de 2015:

• Não é armadilhar, é criar harmonia, é construir uma sinfonia... (Julho de 2011)
• Scripting markets (Abril de 2014)
• Driving markets (Maio de 2014)
• "The key source of success is to conceive the VCS and make it work" (Setembro de 2017)
• Market shaping (Janeiro de 2018)
• Assumir o desafio de mudar um mercado (parte IV) (Janeiro de 2018)
• "You can’t shape your customer" (Abril de 2018)

Agora encontro "Re‐shaping demand landscapes: How firms change customer preferences to better fit their products":

"I suggest that in addition to repositioning their products to accommodate customer preferences firms also change the distribution of customer preferences to accommodate the firms’ products.
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Specifically, I argue that firms alter customer preferences by adding, removing, and transforming the dimensions of the demand landscape.
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Managers often assume that customer tastes are fixed and that the only way to improve a product’s appeal to customers is to change the products’ attributes to better accommodate the customers’ preferences. In this paper, I consider two approaches firms can take to changing customer preferences to better accommodate their products. One approach is to convince the customers that the combination of attributes offered by a focal product, e.g., the Apple iPhone is more valuable than the combination of attributes a customer is used to consuming. An alternative approach is to manipulate the customer’s perception of similarity between a product she is used to buying and the focal firm’s product."

Relacionar também com a sugestão "mudar de clientes", de mudar de vida.

Continua.

"The traditional playbook for strategy is no longer sufficient"

"Many of today's business leaders came of age studying and experiencing a classical model of competition. [Moi ici: Como não recordar as palavras de Napoleão] Most large companies participated in well-defined industries selling similar sets of products; they gained advantage by pursuing economies of scale and static capabilities such as efficiency and quality; [Moi ici: Como não recordar o Normalistão e o plancton] and they achieved those advantages through deliberate analysis, planning, and focused execution.
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The traditional playbook for strategy is no longer sufficient, however. Across all businesses, competition is becoming more complex and dynamic. [Moi ici: Como não recordar a explosão de picos na paisagem enrugada] Industry boundaries are blurring. Product and company lifespans are shrinking. Technological progress and disruption are rapidly transforming business. High economic, political, and competitive uncertainty is conspicuous and likely to persist for the foreseeable future.
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Accordingly, in addition to the classical advantages of scale, companies are now contending with new dimensions of competition  —   shaping malleable situations, adapting to uncertain ones, and surviving harsh ones  —   which in turn require new approaches. And the stakes are higher than ever: the gap between the performance of top- and bottom-quartile companies has increased in each of the last six decades.[Moi ici: Como não recordar o bispo Berkeley]
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Today's business leaders are having to deal with multiple and complex short-term concerns, like declining growth, political uncertainty, resistance to globalization, social division, and so on. But as the 2020s approach, leaders must also look beyond today's situation and understand at a more fundamental level what will separate the winners from the losers in the next decade."

Trecho retirado de "Today's CEO playbook is outdated. Here are 5 things rising stars should focus on to win in the next decade"

É nestes momentos de mudança ... (parte II)

Parte I.

Quem está de fora do mundo da economia privada não imagina que as empresas estejam sujeitas ao sobe e desce da paisagem competitiva. Gente, sem skin-in-the-game, com o salário garantido por direitos adquiridos, acredita que se uma empresa fecha é porque o patrão, ou a gestão é burra, ou pouco séria.

Lembram-se dos milhões de euros que foram distribuídos em apoios e subsídios no tempo de Cavaco primeiro-ministro? Quantas vezes já ouviram pessoas dizerem que esse dinheiro foi torrado em jipes e dachas? Qual a argumentação? O encerramento de tantas PMEs durante o seu consulado.

Estão a ver o pico da esquerda surgir lá em cima? Enquanto ele sobe o pico da direita afunda-se, e quem lá vivia entrou no vermelho. Depois, chega a vez do pico da esquerda se afundar, enquanto o pico da direita começa a crescer.

O que aconteceu no consulado de Cavaco?
Com a entrada na CEE, o mercado onde as empresas portuguesas competiam alterou-se radicalmente.  As empresas que competiam num mercado protegido por barreiras alfandegárias não estavam preparadas para a nova arena competitiva e muitas não sobreviveram apesar dos apoios. À medida que esta nova paisagem competitiva assentou, as empresas portuguesas, e os investidores estrangeiros, começaram a perceber que Portugal tinha uma vantagem competitiva importante a nível dos custos (a china da Europa antes de haver China). Lembro-me de nessa altura (1994?) entrar num avião e ver na capa de uma revista a taxa de desemprego, 3,9%.

Tudo corria no melhor dos mundos, mas de repente... a China entra no mercado e a arena competitiva volta a alterar-se. A China veio competir com vantagem competitiva com as empresas portuguesas e nova mortandade ocorreu. E o dinheiro dos apoios e subsídios da UE que tinham apoiado as empresas no cenário anterior, foi trucidado pela nova realidade.

Depois, outra realidade após 2008, outro corrupio ...

A vida das empresas privadas é este permanente sobressalto, mesmo quando se faz tudo bem, a paisagem competitiva pode alterar-se e "estragar" tudo. A malta dos direitos adquiridos não percebe que a uma empresa privada não adianta o choradinho. Como no livro do !Quem mexeu no meu queijo", têm de se comportar como os ratinhos, os Pigarros são enterrados sem cerimónia. O azar e a sorte estão presentes. Esta é a altura em que me lembro de Shakespear e do seu Rei Lear...

Por que é que o balanced scorecard entra em alta nestas épocas de mudança acentuada?

É nestes momentos de mudança ...

Estavam as empresas tão entretidas a fazer a sua escalada na paisagem competitiva:

A empresa A a almejar chegar ao topo de um certo pico. Assim como a empresa C. A empresa B, por seu lado, fruto de más decisões, está a descer na paisagem, sinal de deterioração de desempenho.

E de repente, a paisagem que parecia ilusoriamente estável, move-se com alguma rapidez e dimensão.  E aquilo que era um pico interessante começa a afundar-se e a gerar cada vez menos rentabilidade.

Esta mudança na paisagem gera apreensão e incerteza. Algumas empresas, ignoram a mudança na paisagem e repetem as mesmas abordagens do passado, esperando que voltem a resultar, até porque estão a tentar com mais força. Mais ou menos empresas não conseguem encontrar a tempo um caminho para um novo pico e acabam por desaparecer. Com o tempo, através da capacidade adaptava, da tentativa e erro, algumas empresas começam a descobrir o que parecem ser caminhos para novos picos. Em alguns casos encontram caminhos interessantes que permitem iniciar escaladas recompensadoras, noutros casos os caminhos interessantes não passam de ilusões para pequenos, muito pequenos picos locais que não sustentam uma empresa. Com o tempo, as notícias espalham-se e os rumores sobre os caminhos encontrados por algumas empresas que estão a sentir-se bem sucedidas, dão origem a uma contaminação que alimenta a criação de novas empresas, porque reduziu-se a incerteza sobre como ter sucesso no novo mundo. Entretanto, a velocidade de mudança da paisagem diminui, e parece que se chega a um novo estado estacionário.

Quando penso nos relatos registados no texto sobre o caldinho, ou sobre as empresas de componentes, é neste jogo, neste bailado entre fenótipo e genótipo que penso.

Quando muda a paisagem, as estratégias em vigor ficam quase todas obsoletas, ou menos eficazes. Ou seja, o genótipo já não é o mais adequado para os desafios da nova realidade. Há que fazer experiências para descobrir quais as novas estratégias possíveis. Não é um campo aberto de possibilidades, mas um campo quase sempre limitado pelas experiências anteriores, o espaço de Minkowski.

É nestes momentos de mudança imposta pela alteração da paisagem que se sente no ar uma procura mais forte pelo uso do balanced scorecard.

Gabiche? (parte V)

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

Quando olhamos para um ecossistema observamos diferentes espécies.

Qual a espécie mais bem sucedida?

Faz-me recuar a Beinhocker e ao seu fabuloso livro "The Origin of Wealth":

"Soon, something else began to happen in the pulsing soup of strategies— innovations began to appear. Mutations that added genes caused agent memory sizes to grow, thus enabling the agents to look further back in history and devise strategies that were more complex. Many of the mutants were nonsensical strategies that died off quickly. But, in general, more memory is a big advantage, and new strategies that were successful began to emerge and reproduce.
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So who was the winner? What was the best strategy in the end? What Lindgren found was that this is a nonsensical question. In an evolutionary system such as Lindgren's model, there is no single winner, no optimal, no best strategy. Rather, anyone who is alive at a particular point in time, is in effect a winner, because everyone else is dead. To be alive at all, an agent must have a strategy with something going for it, some way of making a living, defending against competitors, and dealing with the vagaries of its environment.
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Likewise, we cannot say any single strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma ecology was a winner."

Agora olhemos para as empresas como espécies, e para a paisagem competitiva como um espaço altamente enrugado:

O mainstream ainda vê a paisagem competitiva como ela era no paradigma do século XX. Ou seja, todas as empresas do mesmo sector de actividade competem entre si pelos mesmos clientes, com a mesma proposta de valor e em busca da máxima eficiência.

No entanto, em Mongo, para onde caminhamos, a paisagem competitiva é mais deste tipo:

Quanto mais alto se sobe na paisagem, maior a produtividade, maior o retorno.

As empresas que ocupam as posições A, B e C são competitivas, lideram o espaço que decidiram, ou que lhes calhou, ocupar. No entanto, a empresa C é muito mais produtiva que a empresa A e a empresa B. E apesar de mais produtiva, a empresa C não faz sombra às empresas A e B.

"Knowledge@Wharton: You give the example of what occurred long ago between Steinway and Yamaha. Can you tell us about that?
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Yu: That is an interesting story precisely because executive managers sometimes push back on my argument and say, “I don’t care about copycats. As long as I can provide the best product in the world, I will be all right.” So, I explored Steinway & Sons. They make the best concert piano, no doubt. Yet if we’re looking at the historical financial return of the company, it is a disaster. The company was listed, went private again, was listed again and was forced to go private again. They went from a peak of 6,000 pianos sold per year down to 2,000. Today, they are reduced to one single factory. They still make the best piano. Their workers are passionate, and yet they were disrupted by Japan’s Yamaha.
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A note to this story is there is no change of technology. It’s not like digital photography destroying Kodak. A piano is still a piano — it’s a hammer striking a string. But if the knowledge is stagnating; no matter how good you are, the latecomer can come in and leverage the scale of the economy, automation and lower cost structure, disassembling your product and reverse engineering. Over time, they would surpass the industry pioneer. I thought it was a cautionary tale: Try to avoid getting trapped in a golden cage."

Trecho retirado de "How Businesses Can Stay a Step Ahead of Copycats"

A paisagem enrugada

Esta imagem é uma boa metáfora sobre o que acontece em Mongo.

De olhar para um sector económico como um bloco homogéneo, até a uma paisagem enrugada com muitos e diversos picos.

Imagem retirada de "Think Biologically: Messy Management for a Complex World"

Altos e baixos

Ontem, durante uma caminhada matinal de cerca de 7,7 km comecei a ler "Leal: “How to thrive in a world where everything can be copied" de Howard Yu.

De rajada li quase 1/8 do livro (pensei logo em 60 km de caminhadas para o completar) e encontrei uma série de coisas interessantes. No entanto, gostaria de começar por um relato, o relato da experiência de vida do autor, natural de Hong Kong:

“my fascination—or perhaps, obsession—with industry dynamics and the constant displacement of early pioneers goes back much further to a time before I thought of joining academia. Born and raised in Hong Kong, I watched the inevitable migration of knowledge and capital. I remember my elementary school teachers describing the economy of Hong Kong as an “entrepôt,” a term the British applied to my city when it served as the only window between China and the rest of the world. Virtually all merchandise and goods—cheese, chocolate, automobiles, raw cotton, and rice—had to pass through Hong Kong on their way in and out of China.
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With its low labor costs, Hong Kong rose as a major manufacturing hub for labor-intensive industries. The once-sleepy fishing village became “the Pearl of the East,” a shining example of economic development. By 1972, Hong Kong had replaced Japan as the world’s largest toy exporter, with garment and apparel manufacturing forming the backbone of our economy. Li Ka-shing, one of the richest men in Asia with an estimated net worth of $30 billion, started out as a factory man, a supplier of hand-knit plastic flowers, before he moved into property development, container port operation, mass transportation, retailing, telecommunications, and much else.
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But in the early 1980s, Hong Kong’s manufacturing cluster imploded. Factories moved to mainland China and, with them, manufacturing jobs. They first moved across the border to Shenzhen, then to Guangdong Province, and then to the rest of China. Unemployment in Hong Kong soared, crushing the optimism that had characterized residents for so many years. “In the year of my graduation from college, my classmates were speaking of the need to acquire new skills to remain self-sufficient. That was before we had landed our first jobs. To survive, we told ourselves, we had to reinvent.
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And Hong Kong did just that. It cast aside its former manufacturing and colonial identity and reinvented itself as a financial and logistics hub for the region. That reinvention of Hong Kong was where I grew up. It happened at the time when policy makers throughout the world were singularly praising outsourcing as “efficient.” It all happened before any free-market economist became alarmed that emerging market firms might one day catch up with established ones in the West. It was an era of unbridled trust in globalization. But for us Hong Kongers, including myself, it was the age of distrust. Everyone I spoke to yearned for stability and continuity. I wanted to find out how to achieve just that.”

Por cá a maioria das pessoas associa os altos e baixos da economia, a azar, a ignorância ou a falcatrua. No entanto, a economia é uma continuação da biologia, com os seus altos e baixos mesmo para quem trabalha bem. Em vez de confiar que o ovo vai estar no cu da galinha, em vez de confiar que os planetas se alinharão quando for preciso, é preciso tentar estar um passo à frente e, mesmo assim perceber que pode não ser suficiente.

A dispersão de desempenho intra-sectorial a explodir

Costumo usar esta figura para ilustrar a evolução que acredito ter acontecido desde meados do século XX até aos nossos dias.

O século XX valorizava a uniformização para tirar partido da vantagem da escala. Assim, basicamente havia uma estratégia única para o sucesso, crescer mais depressa que os outros e via escala e eficiência conquistar os clientes e aumentar a quota de mercado. Mongo, terra de tribos apaixonadas, permite a coexistência de cada vez mais estratégias. Recordar McArthur:

Esta narrativa pode ser traduzida numericamente a:

"Corporate strategy is increasingly challenging for today’s leaders. Business environments are becoming more and more varied, which requires companies to actively choose strategic approaches that match their own specific situations. External forces such as political pressures, social expectations and macroeconomic circumstances are having greater impacts, adding to the complexity of strategy. And the increasing pace of change means that strategic assumptions must be re-evaluated constantly.
At the same time, corporate strategy is also becoming more important. With aggregate growth trending downward globally and new competitors presenting a constant threat of disruption, companies can no longer count on merely extending and exploiting historical strategies over the long term. This means that strategy has become a more important source of differentiation between firms: Within a given industry, the average dispersion of performance has doubled since the 1980s."

Trecho e imagens retirados de "The Board’s Role in Strategy in a Changing Environment"