"strategy needs to change as the world does"

ONE COLD, HARD truth laid bare by the pandemic is how vulnerable a business can become when strategic foresight and operational flexibility are low on the list of priorities for boards and leadership teams.

...

strategy needs to change as the world does. Over the past 30 years we've lived through a remarkable era of macrostability, characterized by largely peaceful geopolitics, generally falling interest rates, expanding credit markets, and moderate inflation. During that time, five new trends in the business landscape emerged: globalization, capital superabundance, the declining cost of distance, labor superabundance, and, underlying all those, technology-led innovation. Winning companies adapted their organizations to the trends, embracing such mantras as "Move fast" and "Adapt or die" to create enormous amounts of value.

We've now entered a new era in which new rules apply. It's a time of post-globalization, capital rationalization, spatial dispersion, shrinking workforces, and dependence on automation. Meanwhile, technology-led innovation is only accelerating and compounding. In this environment, the intuitions that leaders have developed over the past few decades will cease to be useful-and the shape of opportunity and risk will be entirely different.

If leaders want to continue creating value in the era of volatility, they must still focus on adaptability. But they'll also need to revive strategies that boost investment in two other capabilities that have fallen out of favor in recent years: resilience and prediction. Ultimately, every company will need a strategy that allocates time, resources, and energy to all three capabilities."

Trechos retirados de "How to Succeed in an Era of Volatility"

Uma nova lógica competitiva

Em "The New Logic of Competition" encontrei uma figura muito interessante, muito rica:

"Today, artificial intelligence, sensors, and digital platforms have already increased the opportunity for learning more effectively—but competing on the rate of learning will become a necessity by the 2020s. The dynamic, uncertain business environment will require companies to focus more on discovery and adaptation rather than only on forecasting and planning. [Moi ici: Apostar mais em exploration do que em exploitation, apostar mais em experimentação e novidade do que em seguir o guião]
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Classical models of competition assume that discrete companies make similar products and compete within clearly delineated industries. But technology has dramatically reduced communication and transaction costs, weakening the Coasean logic for combining many activities inside a few vertically integrated firms. At the same time, uncertainty and disruption require individual firms to be more adaptable, and they make business environments increasingly shapeable. Companies now have opportunities to influence the development of the market in their favor, but they can do this only by coordinating with other stakeholders.
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As a result of these forces, new industrial architectures are emerging based on the coordination of ecosystems—complex, semifluid networks of companies that challenge several traditional business assumptions. [Moi ici: Algo que começámos a perceber quando descobrimos o papel dos influenciadores, dos prescritores, dos reguladores, e dos clientes dos clientes]
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New opportunities are likely to come increasingly from digitizing the physical world, enabled by the rapid development and penetration of AI and the Internet of Things. This will increasingly bring tech companies into areas—such as B2B and businesses involving long-lived and specialized assets—that are still dominated by older incumbent firms.
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Companies can no longer expect to succeed by leaning predominantly on their existing business models. Long-run economic growth rates have declined in many economies, and demographics point to a continuation of that pattern. Competitive success has become less permanent over time. And markets are increasingly shapeable, increasing the potential reward for innovation. As a result, the ability to generate new ideas is more important than ever. [Moi ici: Subir na escala de valor depende cada vez mais não do que se produz, mas das experiências que permitimos que o cliente sinta na sua vida ao integrar a nossa oferta na sua actividade]
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Looking ahead to the 2020s, uncertainty is high on many fronts. Technological change is disrupting businesses and bringing new social, political, and ecological questions to the forefront.
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Furthermore, deep-seated structural forces indicate this period of elevated uncertainty is likely to persist: technological progress will not abate; the rise of China as an economic power will continue to challenge international institutions; demographic trends point toward an era of lower global growth, which will further strain societies; and social polarization will continue to challenge governments’ ability to effectively respond to national or global risks.
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Under such conditions, it will become more difficult to rely on forecasts and plans. Business leaders will need to consider the larger picture, including economic, social, political, and ecological dimensions, making sure their companies can endure in the face of unanticipated shocks. In other words, businesses will effectively need to compete on resilience." [Moi ici: Mas a constituição e os partidos socialistas, da direita e da esquerda, consideram a flexibilidade e a resiliência crimes graves! ]

Como é que a sua organização se está a preparar para este mundo muito mais incerteza? O que está a fazer para ser mais criativa? O que está a fazer para conciliar digital e físico? O que está a fazer para construir ou integrar um ecossistema? O que está a fazer para aprender muito mais depressa?

Resiliência para o pós-isto

Os fragilistas acreditam que os astros se vão alinhar para que tudo corra bem:

"Os fragilistas partem do princípio que o pior não vai acontecer e, por isso, desenham planos que acabam por ser irrealistas ou pouco resilientes. Depois, quando as coisas acontecem, chega a hora de culpar os outros pelos problemas que não souberam prever, não quiseram prever, ou que ajudaram a criar."

O anti-fragilismo acha que temos de estar preparados para o pior.

"Complacency, arrogance, and greed crowd out resilience. Humility and a noble purpose fuel it. Those with an authentic desire to serve, not just narcissism about wanting to be at the top, are willing to settle for less as an investment in better things later.
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Potential troubles lurk around every corner, whether they stem from unexpected environmental jolts or individual flaws and mistakes. Whatever the source, what matters is how we deal with them. When surprises are the new normal, resilience is the new skill."

Isto é o que vamos precisar para o pós-isto, resiliência:

"Resilience draws from strength of character, from a core set of values that motivate efforts to overcome the setback and resume walking the path to success. It involves self-control and willingness to acknowledge one’s own role in defeat. Resilience also thrives on a sense of community — the desire to pick oneself up because of an obligation to others and because of support from others who want the same thing. Resilience is manifested in actions — a new contribution, a small win, a goal that takes attention off of the past and creates excitement about the future." 

Trechos retirados de "Surprises Are the New Normal; Resilience Is the New Skill"

Trabalhar para o depois de amanhã

Conseguem recordar as vezes em que aqui no blogue relatamos o nosso espanto com eventos em que empresas grandes supostamente vão ensinar as empresas pequenas a exportar?
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Como se as estratégias, como se as propostas de valor, como se as prateleiras, como se os relacionamentos, como se os recursos fossem os mesmos.
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Conseguem relacionar este cenário de concentração na empresa de hoje com a mensagem de Alicia Juarrero:

"Complex adaptive systems and evolution select for resilience, not stability."
  ...
"Stability gets killed by next disease, next pest, next competitor, next predator, next crisis
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Resilience is evolving towards greater evolvability, enabling creativity and emergence"

É preciso cultivar a tal ambidextridade e, apostar simultaneamente na "exploration" e na "exploitation".

"valuable learning comes not from being told a fact. Recited facts are “inert” ideas disconnected from the fullness of our understanding. Valuable learning, says Whitehead, means discovering “living” knowledge: ideas “utilised, tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.”
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So where do organizational capabilities come from?
Wrong answer: Organizational capabilities come from researching “best business practice.” I often have executives come to Stanford thinking they will write down inert ideas told to them by professors. There can be some value in this exercise, but frankly you could parrot inert ideas more efficiently using information  technology. Besides, everybody else can easily find out these inert ideas too. A list of best practices will not make you a great company, any more than finding a recipe will make you a great cook.
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Right answer: Design your organization so that it develops new capabilities. We know that some companies learn much better than others. Make it your job, as a leader, to help your organization be better at learning. Structure your organization so that your people must engage with important, unsolved problems. Establish routines that allow for failure and reward those who try to discover – regardless of the ultimate outcome."

Trechos retirados de "The Secret"

"-THERE WILL BE TURBULENCE!" por isso, safe-fail

Na semana passada, através de um tweet de Esko Kilpi cheguei a este vídeo:
Safe-Fail, NOT Fail-Safe - Alicia Juarrero from William Evans on Vimeo.
Já o vi 3 vezes. Excepcional.
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A certa altura dei comigo a pensar que se viajasse atrás no tempo, humildemente, recuaria a 9 de Agosto de 2007, para o dar ao então primeiro-ministro.
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Quantas pessoas nas empresas, menos, é certo, e sobretudo na política, assumem que o futuro será estável? A mensagem de Alicia Juarrero é:

"-THERE WILL BE TURBULENCE!"

Como não recordar Vítor Bento em "O anónimo engenheiro da província pensava...", quando Alicia Juarrero retrata o pensamento dominante acerca da economia, como quando se adia o lançamento do space-shuttle em Cabo Canaveral, por causa do mau tempo, aguarda-se pelo retorno da normalidade.

"They both assume equilibrium, stability as a model, as a framework to work with."

Depois, Juarrero chama a atenção para a diferença entre a mecânica newtoniana e a economia... com as pessoas, o contexto é fundamental.
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Como não pensar nos "cofres cheios por um lado" e no canto da sereia que convida ao retorno à orgia despesista por outro, ao ouvir coisas como:

"Haverá instabilidade, haverá perturbação, haverá turbulência, virão problemas. Por isso, o objectivo é sobreviver aos problemas que virão. Quem acredita na estabilidade, os fragilistas, anda na corda bamba, estica a corda, coloca-se numa posição de fragilidade. Quando chega a turbulência, e ela acaba sempre por chegar, não há capacidade de resistir, de aguentar..."

Mais citações:

"Complex adaptive systems and evolution select for resilience, not stability."
  ...
"Stability gets killed by next disease, next pest, next competitor, next predator, next crisis
...
Resilience is evolving towards greater evolvability, enabling creativity and emergence
...
Biology is the metaphor" [Moi ici: Uma frase que tão bem se encaixa da narrativa e no sistema de crenças deste blogue]

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Para reflexão

No Twitter, o @joaomiranda escreveu:

"Sabiam que, no 11 de Setembro, o voo 93 não foi usado como míssil porque a porta do cockpit não era blindada? (29 de Março)
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Segurança aérea chegou à fase em q nenhuma medida é melhoria de Pareto (2 de Abril)
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Ou se quiserem, estão a tentar fazer trading com ruído (2 de Abril)"

Lembrei-me logo deste postal "and then some":

""We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.
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This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct ..."

E deste artigo "Why rules can’t solve everything" (um francês nunca escreveria isto, o ADN cultural impedi-lo-ia):

"Social work is difficult not because of the kinds of predictable situations that can be mitigated but because of the ones no one saw coming.
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But no amount of rules will prevent every case of child death.  Just like no amount of rules will eliminate every case of discrimination, every war, every instance of every bad thing that happens to humans.
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Rules look after complicated problems in which the cause and the effect are clear going forward.  But the problems we are seeing now are complex, meaning that the cause and the effect are only obvious in retrospect.  ...  Retrospective coherence contains a dangerous pitfall for decision makers: it fools you into believe that the causes of a particular event are knowable."

Acerca da variedade intra-sectorial.

Uma economia saudável funciona assim, sem caminho único, sem a Grande Estratégia delineada por um Grande Planeador e que todos devem seguir. De um lado, o caminho da eficiência, da escala, do volume, da organização, da logística:

• Grupo Aquinos investe 30 milhões em nova fábrica no concelho de Tábua

Do outro, o caminho da personalização, do pessoal, da autenticidade, da narrativa:

"Todos os produtos são produzidos por encomenda em Portugal. Desta forma conseguimos corresponder a pedidos de personalização do móvel, respeitando sempre a qualidade de desenho. Alterações de dimensões, acabamentos, cores são possíveis. Alterações mais profundas poderão estar sujeitas a uma comissão de desenvolvimento/produção. Todo o mobiliário é produzido manualmente por oficinas de pequena escala e por artesãos. Grande parte dos fornecedores são empresas familiares locais. Fazemos um esforço para que os nossos fornecedores estejam sediados perto do nossa unidade de produção. Neste momento, grande parte dos nossos fornecedores distam cerca de 15km."

Há bocado, numa conversa no Twitter, lembrei-me disto:

 'Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics' 

Aqui os termos amador e profissional estão relacionados com a aplicação dos conceitos estratégia e logística no ambiente militar. Um amador pode entreter-se com cogitações estratégicas sobre como vai ganhar uma guerra. Contudo, sem uma logística capaz de suportar o exército, qualquer estratégia é um ídolo de pés de barro, porque os soldados precisam de comer e beber.
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A malta da Aquinos deve ser craque, mas craque mesmo, de  logística.
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Quantas empresas em Portugal podem dizer que controlam essa vertente de forma profissional? Faz sentido impor um modelo de negócio único a todos? Uma economia saudável é esta diversidade...
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E volta a 2003, a Setembro de 2003, nunca me esqueço desse mês:

"Every business is successful until it’s not. What’s amazing is how often top management is surprised when “not” happens. This astonishment, this belated recognition of dramatically changed circumstances, virtually guarantees that the work of renewal will be significantly, perhaps dangerously, postponed.
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Why the surprise? Is it that the world is not only changing but changing in ways that simply cannot be anticipated—that it is shockingly turbulent? 

Como reduzir o risco de obsolescência de um sector económico?

"Valuing Variety
 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 pos-sesses 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."

Permitindo, promovendo e valorizando a diversidade, a variedade intra-sectorial.

Acerca da resiliência

"Resilience is the best strategy for those realistic enough to admit that they can't predict the future with more accuracy than others.
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most competitions aren't winner take all. Most endeavors we participate in offer long-term, generous entrants plenty of rewards. Playing the game is a form of winning the game. In those competitions, we win by being resilient. (Moi ici: Nem de propósito. Ainda esta manhã recordei Beinhocker e a sua citação)
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Unfortunately, partly due to our fear of losing as well as our mythologizing of the winner-take-all, we often make two mistakes. The first is to overdo our focus on accuracy, on guessing right, on betting it all on the 'right' answer. We underappreciate just how powerful long-term resilience can be.
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And the second mistake is to be so overwhelmed by all the choices and all the apparent risk that instead of choosing the powerful path of resilience, we choose not to play at all. Denial rarely pays."

BTW, resiliência não conjuga bem com endividamento para lá do razoável.

Trechos retirados de "Accuracy, resilience and denial"

O crescimento da desigualdade

Quando se fala no aumento da desigualdade social eu penso logo nisto "‘Gazelles’ widen company growth gap" como a verdadeira causa:

"The divide between midsized UK companies that are merely surviving and the better-performing “gazelles” is widening, according to a new report.
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Figures compiled by Experian, the credit checking agency, noted that although the overall number of medium-sized companies – defined as those with turnover of £2.5m-£100m – has been broadly flat at 24,955 over the past 12 months, the number of businesses within that group which have achieved high levels of growth has increased by 10 per cent to 4,353."

É a velha história que os macroeconomistas não incluem nos seus modelos, qualquer sector de actividade económica está carregado de heterogeneidade, de variabilidade, de diversidade de abordagens, de diversidade de visões, de diversidade de interpretações do que é problema e do que é solução. E é essa diversidade que torna as sociedades e as economias resilientes.
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Recordar a série "Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões", com especial relevo para as partes II e III.

Resiliência e volatilidade

Um excelente artigo de Nassim Taleb "Learning to love volatility":

"We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. If this were so, our institutions would have no self-healing properties and would need someone to run and micromanage them, to protect their safety, because they cannot survive on their own.
By contrast, natural or organic systems are antifragile: They need some dose of disorder in order to develop. Deprive your bones of stress and they become brittle. This denial of the antifragility of living or complex systems is the costliest mistake that we have made in modern times. Stifling natural fluctuations masks real problems, causing the explosions to be both delayed and more intense when they do take place."

...

"So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. In the long run, bailing out people is less harmful to the system than bailing out firms; (Moi ici: Recordo as ideias de um anónimo engenheiro de província em Dezembro de 2008 em "Como eu olho para crise") we should have policies now that minimize the possibility of being forced to bail out firms in the future, with the moral hazard this entails."

E, na linha do aqui escrito ontem:

"Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the "efficient," when too large, isn't so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses.
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So we need to distribute decisions and projects across as many units as possible, which reinforces the system by spreading errors across a wider range of sources. In fact, I have argued that government decentralization would help to lower public deficits. A large part of these deficits comes from underestimating the costs of projects, and such underestimates are more severe in large, top-down governments." 

Como eu gosto disto, desta crença nos anónimos, nos amadores, no sentido mais belo do termo:

"The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: ... America has emulated this earlier model, in the invention of everything from cybernetics to the pricing formulas for derivatives. They were developed by practitioners in trial-and-error mode, drawing continuous feedback from reality. To promote antifragility, we must recognize that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of formal education that a culture supports and its volume of trial-and-error by tinkering. Innovation doesn't require theoretical instruction, what I like to compare to "lecturing birds on how to fly."

 A combinar com esta leitura de ontem "Seven characteristics of resilience":

"A common mistake is to assume that resilience means to recover as is, which is an over narrow definition.  Often failure means rebirth, creating something new, recognising that the old is no longer sustainable.
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Trying to prevent final collapse will just expend energy that you will need post-collapse to create something new and more sustainable. (Moi ici: Uma forma simples de explicar porque é que a austeridade em Portugal trouxe mais desemprego do que o que estava nas contas de todos, mais de uma década a pedir dinheiro emprestado para manter o emprego sobre-dimensionado em vários sectores da economia)
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Dynamic re-organisation is greatly facilitated by modularity (or finely grained objects to reference my three heuristics of complex adaptive systems).  That means small units that can combine and recombine, or even split off and reform with ease.  Not so small that there is no coherence, but small enough for recombination.
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Diversity and what I call requisite variety are key.  Without diversity, and dare I say it contradiction, a system lacks the capacity to evolve quickly as it has too few things to build on.  Conformity and consensus are the enemy of managing under conditions of uncertainty."

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E voltamos a Setembro de 2003...

and then some

"We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. Each of these safety features, however, also increases the complexity of the whole. Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk themselves, as the number of possible interactions — both anticipated and unanticipated — between various components becomes incomprehensibly large.
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This, in turn, amplifies uncertainty when things go wrong, making crises harder to correct: Is that flashing alert signaling a genuine emergency? Is it a false alarm? Or is it the result of some complex interaction nobody has ever seen before? Imagine facing a dozen such alerts simultaneously, and having to decide what's true and false about all of them at the same time. Imagine further that, if you choose incorrectly, you will push the system into an unrecoverable catastrophe. Now, give yourself just a few seconds to make the right choice. How much should you be blamed if you make the wrong one?"

Vem-me logo à mente "Eliminar o pivot - esse é o objectivo" e "Diagnosing “vulnerable system syndrome”: an essential prerequisite to effective risk management"
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E, no fundo, é também o que se passa com as sociedades que se tornaram demasiado complexas para este nível do jogo e estão maduras para o reset e o recomeço num nível seguinte... Recordar Tainter:

"Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
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In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change."

Trecho inicial retirado de "Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity"

A evolução da ideia de mosaico estratégico (parte I)

"However celebrated, a turnaround is a testament to a company’s lack of resilience. A turnaround is transformation tragically delayed." (Moi ici: Citação muito adequada para acompanhar este artigo "Sócrates admite ir ainda mais longe nas medidas para combater a crise")
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Os encalhados (aqui, aqui, aqui e aqui só nos últimos dias), os que ainda não viram a luz na estrada para Damasco, propõem a receita antiga, a receita em que foram doutrinados quando andavam na universidade.
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No entanto, esquecem que toda e qualquer estratégia é situacional e, por isso, transitória.
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"you have to face up to the inevitability of strategy decay.
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Strategies decay for four reasons. Over time they get replicated; they lose their distinctiveness and, therefore, their power to produce above-average returns.
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Good strategies also get supplanted by better strategies.
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Strategies get exhausted as markets become saturated, customers get bored, or optimization programs reach the point of diminishing returns.
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Finally, strategies get eviscerated. The Internet may not have changed everything, but it has dramatically accelerated the migration of power from producers to consumers. Customers are using their newfound power like a knife, carving big chunks out of once-fat margins."
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Assim, a estratégia que resultava no tempo em que os encalhados andavam na escola e em que a procura era maior do que a oferta acabou, pelo menos para este país.
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Quando comparamos os custos laborais em Portugal com os de outros países, como se pode ver neste quadro:

Percebemos que, por sistema, não podemos competir na venda de bens transaccionáveis com o argumento dos custos mais baixos... foi chão que deu uvas.
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E, seguindo os ensinamentos de Bruce Greenwald e Judd Kahn em "Competition Demystified - A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy" (que mencionei aqui) o melhor que há a fazer é reconhecer a incapacidade de competir pelos custos e abandonar o piquenique com estilo, para procurar outras paragens, outras estratégias onde possamos ser competitivos.
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Podemos descrever o universo competitivo das empresas como se fossem paisagens competitivas:
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"Fitness landscapes deform in response to changes in the abiotic environment and in response to coevolution. In coevolutionary processes, the fitness of one organism or species depends upon the characteristics of the other organisms or species with which it interacts, while all simultaneously adapt and change" (Moi ici: Este trecho é retirado de "The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" de Stuart Kauffman. Conseguem imaginar uma paisagem com picos e vales? 

Conseguem imaginar que esses picos podem crescer e transformar-se em montanhas, ou podem diminuir até voltarem a ser parte do vale, Conseguem imaginar que de repente uma pequena área do vale emerge e transforma-se num pico. Sobre esta paisagem nascem, vivem e morrem organismos-empresas. Quanto mais elevado estiverem maior o seu sucesso, longas temporadas no vale levam à morte desses organismos-empresas. Recordo aqui também Lindgren e as suas experiências virtuais simulando a vida das estratégias.)
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As estratégias que resultam num dado momento são função do estado do meio abiótico e dos estados dos organismos presentes em interacção. Mudando o estado do meio e mudando os estados dos organismos em interacção, surgem condições que facilitam novas estratégias e condenam as anteriormente bem sucedidas. É o velho: "É a vida!"
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Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient. The evidence is all around us. Big companies are failing more frequently.
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In less turbulent times, established companies could rely on the flywheel of momentum to sustain their success.
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The fact that success has become less persistent strongly suggests that momentum is not the force it once was.
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In the past, executives had the luxury of assuming that business models were more or less immortal. Companies always had to work to get better, of course, but they seldom had to get different — not at their core, not in their essence. Today, getting different is the imperative"
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Quais são as novas estratégias que vão ter sucesso? Não podemos à priori saber, não podemos cometer este erro-socialista de palmatória de acreditar que se sabe mais do que o mercado na sua variedade de escolhas.
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"Just as biology can teach us something about variety, markets can teach us something about what it takes to liberate resources from the prison of precedent. The evidence of the past century leaves little room for doubt: Market-based economies outperform those that are centrally planned. It’s not that markets are infallible. Like human beings, they are vulnerable to mania and despair. But, on average, markets are better than hierarchies at getting the right resources behind the right opportunities at the right time. Unlike hierarchies, markets are apolitical and unsentimental; they don’t care whose ox gets gored. (Moi ici: O dinheiro que se tem torrado em Srs dos Perdões, Qimondas e Aerosoles, sempre dinheiro perdido por que se trata de uma tentativa de salvar o passado, um passado que já não se ajusta a um novo mundo. E aquele grito "Espanha! Espanha! Espanha!" é um bom exemplo da incapacidade das hieraquias para alocarem recursos) The average company, though, operates more like a socialist state than an unfettered market. A hierarchy may be an effective mechanism for applying resources, but it is an imperfect device for allocating resources. Specifically, the market for capital and talent that exists within companies is a whole lot less efficient than the market for talent and capital that exists between companies.
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In fact, a company can be operationally efficient and strategically inefficient. (Moi ici: Por favor voltar atrás e reler... e passar aos encalhados) It can maximize the efficiency of its existing programs and processes and yet fail to find and fund the unconventional ideas and initiatives that might yield an even higher return. While companies have many ways of assessing operational efficiency, most firms are clueless when it comes to strategic efficiency.  (Moi ici: Assim como os encalhados, só conhecem um pedal, só conhecem um caminho... perderam a plasticidade mental para equacionar outras alternativas novas? Ou nunca chegaram a cultivar essa propriedade?) How can corporate leaders be sure that the current set of initiatives represents the highest value use of talent and capital if the company hasn’t generated and examined a large population of alternatives? And how can executives be certain that the right resources are lined up behind the right opportunities if capital and talent aren’t free to move to high-return projects or businesses? The simple answer is, they can’t." (Moi ici: Reconhecer isto deve ser um trauma para os caviares e socialistas)
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A única forma de saber é tentar, é experimentar:
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"The isolation—and distrust—of strategic experimentation is a leftover from the industrial age, when variety was often seen as the enemy.
A variance, whether from a quality standard, a production schedule, or a budget, was viewed as a bad thing—which it often was. But in many companies, the aversion to unplanned variability has metastasized into a general antipathy toward the nonconforming and the deviant.
This infatuation with conformance severely hinders the quest for resilience. (Moi ici: Esta é uma grande crítica que pode ser feita aos sistemas da qualidade. Estão tão concentrados na conformidade que fazem esquecer,  ou sufocar, a experimentação. Pregam tanto a normalização que proscrevem a diferença, a novidade. Confundem variabilidade com variedade. Acredito que se trata de mais uma Torre de Babel, e as sucessivas recolhas de automóveis de todas as marcas em todos os continentes são, para mim, uma consequência da redução da diversidade e variedade de cabeças pensante e fornecedores na cadeia de valor do automóvel)
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The final barrier to resilience is ideological. The modern corporation is a shrine to a single, 100-year-old ideal - optimization. From “scientific management” to “operations research” to “reengineering” to “enterprise resource planning” to “Six Sigma,” the goal has never changed: Do more, better, faster, and cheaper.
Make no mistake, the ideology of optimization, and its elaboration into values, metrics, and processes, has created enormous material wealth. The ability to produce millions of gadgets, handle millions of transactions, or deliver a service to millions of customers is one of the most impressive achievements of humankind.
But it is no longer enough.
The creed of optimization is perfectly summed up by McDonald’s in its famous slogan, “Billions Served.” The problem comes when some of those billions want to be served something else, something different, something new.  (Moi ici: Esta é a chave para aprender a competir no novo mundo, no planeta Mongo. Já não é uma luta pela uniformização homogeneizadora mas uma explosão de variedade luxuriante. Já não de mega-empresas multinacionais imperiais, mas de empresas rápidas, flexíveis, próximas e amigáveis)
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As an ideal, optimization is sufficient only as long as there’s no fundamental change in what has to be optimized. But if you work for a record company that needs to find a profitable on-line business model, or for an airline struggling to outmaneuver Southwest, or for a hospital trying to deliver quality care despite drastic budget cuts, or for a department store chain getting pummeled by discount retailers, or for an impoverished school district intent on curbing its dropout rate, or for any other organization where more of the same is no longer enough, then optimization is a wholly inadequate ideal.
An accelerating pace of change demands an accelerating pace of strategic evolution, which can be achieved only if a company cares as much about resilience as it does about optimization.
This is currently not the case.
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It’s not that optimization is wrong; it’s that it so seldom has to defend itself against an equally muscular rival. Diligence, focus, and exactitude are reinforced every day, in a hundred ways—through training programs, benchmarking,improvement routines, and measurement systems. But where is the reinforcement for strategic variety, wide-scale experimentation, and rapid resource redeployment?"
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Trechos retirados de "The Quest for Resilience" de Gary Hamel e Liisa Valikangas.
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E voltando à figura:

Nós estamos a abandonar um universo competitivo com um referencial único, com uma moda, com um padrão, com boas-práticas, paisagem central e da direita e, estamos a entrar no universo de Mongo em que existem n picos, existem inúmeras possibilidades, acabou a moda, ficam as tribos.
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Continua



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Não aprendem...

Em 2005 o grito era "Espanha! Espanha! Espanha!"
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Espanha foi o que foi.
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Agora o grito é "Vieira da Silva: Exportações devem apostar nos mercados fora da UE"
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Não aprendem?
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Não conseguem abstrair-se e fazer a experiência de saírem fora do corpo para ver o que está a acontecer? Para perceber o enquadramento?
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A história do Génesis acerca da Torre de Babel é uma lição para todos aqueles que esquecem o valor, o poder, a vantagem da diversidade e, cometem o pecado de pensar e acreditar que conseguem adivinhar o futuro.
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"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."
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Trecho recolhido de "The Quest for Resilience" de Gary Hamel e Liisa Välikangas e publicado na HBR de Setembro de 2003.