"you must organize around projects"

"a different way of thinking about knowledge work: you must organize around projects, not jobs.

...

Knowledge workers don’t manufacture products or perform basic services. But they do produce something, and it is perfectly reasonable to characterize their work as the production of decisions: decisions about what to sell, at what price, to whom, with what advertising strategy, through what logistics system, in what location, and with what staffing levels.

At desks and in meeting rooms, every day of their working lives, knowledge workers hammer away in decision factories. Their raw materials are data, either from their own information systems or from outside providers. They produce lots of memos and presentations full of analyses and recommendations. They engage in production processes—called meetings—that convert this work to finished goods in the form of decisions. Or they generate rework: another meeting to reach the decision that wasn’t made in the first meeting. And they participate in postproduction services: following up on decisions"

...

Knowledge work actually comes primarily in the form of projects, not routine daily tasks. Knowledge workers, therefore, experience big swings between peaks and valleys of decision-making intensity”

Fez-me recuar a:

• Avaliar projectos (parte II) 
• Provocação para empresas certificadas  complementada com a parte II 
• Tenho de testar isto ...

"A ideia de fazer de cada ano um espécie de projecto, algo único e irrepetível, em vez de uma continuação da rotina de sempre, é capaz de ser útil para mudar mentalidades em muitas empresas."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger Martin.

"individuals work with one another"

Dedicado ao meu colega das conversas oxigenadoras:

"Culture. You can only change it by altering how individuals work with one another.

...

So, what is culture and why is it so persistent and limiting to strategy?

There are as many definitions of culture as there are for strategy, but I think of it primarily as a book of rules residing in the minds of employees that guides how they interpret situations and decisions. Culture is what helps a manager understand "how things get done around here,' "what I should do in this situation," and "who must I pay attention to." The rules making up the culture are developed by each person's observations of how people around them react to and explain situations and decisions, particularly those involving extreme outcomes with significant impact for the people involved, even if such decisions or events are unusual.

The strength of a company's culture is determined by the similarity of the mental rule books of the employees. A culture is weak or diffuse if the rule books vary across peopleso that employees' interpretations of a given situation or decision are heterogeneous. Cultures are powerful when the people all have a very similar rule book and consequently interpret and react to the same decision or situation in the same way.

...

Somewhat like a neural network in the brain, culture emerges from the interaction between the environment (the formal mechanisms) and individual behaviors (the interpersonal mechanisms). Because of that, little can be done to change the culture of the organization directly by fiat, and CEOs who make the attempt usually lose their jobs.

...

For a culture to align with changes to the formal mechanisms of the organization, changes are required in the way members of the organization interact.

...

When executives try to change an organization's culture, they often bring the wrong tools to the task-changes to formal processes and systems along with righteous admonition. This approach is doomed to failure because culture depends not on systems and processes or a leader's beliefs but on how individuals react to each other in the context of their rules and relationships. To achieve real culture change, executives should focus on and show discipline in how they structure the human interactions that make up an organization's working day. That requires investing time and committing to repetition. People won't change their ways overnight, but when they do, the consequences are profound and durable."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger L. Martin.

Anónimo da província muito à frente

Em Junho de 2011 escrevi Cuidado com a pedofilia. Em Outubro de 2012 escrevi Fornecer a Autoeuropa não é necessariamente uma boa decisão para uma PME portuguesa-tipo.

A mensagem desses postais é:

"Por que é que uma PME-tipo há-de trabalhar com uma multinacional só interessada no preço se tem mais hipóteses de ser bem tratada e ganhar mais dinheiro trabalhando com outras propostas de valor para outro tipo de clientes?

.

As multinacionais do ramo automóvel não são flor que se cheire, contratos leoninos com cláusulas que impõem respeito e medo.

.

O meu conselho genérico para as PMEs é sempre o mesmo: "Fuja dessa gente. Não se iluda com as quantidades... quantos cêntimos é que vai ganhar por peça? Qual o risco que vai correr? Compensa?""

Em Março de 2016 escrevi Um optimista sem ser cor de rosa onde usei esta imagem:

O mundo 1 é para os pandas (chineses, ou empresas grandes capazes de lidarem com margens apertadas e quantidades grandes).

Ontem, li este texto de Roger Martin, "Small is beautiful" onde apanhei:

"This is the typical dynamic in the modern era. There is full price/value discovery, and the goal of big customers is to grind down suppliers to cost plus as tiny a margin as possible through relentless shopping and negotiation. Smaller customers, on the other hand, are more inclined to buy an offer that meaningfully helps them “do more business.”

The problem is that most B2B companies are still in the mode of thinking that big customers are the most important — the key to both growth and profitability. Hence, they still spare no expense to serve them and put their best sales resources against them. However, though they might expect gratitude in return, they get nothing of the sort. Big customers grind down their suppliers and provide zero rewards for the extra resources that suppliers dedicate to them.

Meanwhile, these B2B companies underinvest in SME customers because they think of them as less important than their big customers. 

...

I think the next wave will feature two dynamics. First, B2B companies will figure out that big customers are not good for them and will make the transition to aligning their R&D efforts and their best sales assets behind SME customers."

What price point?

"We started to test the new Olay product at premium price points of $12.99 to $18.99 and got very different results,” he says. “At $12.99, there was a positive response and a reasonably good rate of purchase intent. But most who signaled a desire to buy at $12.99 were mass shoppers. Very few department store shoppers were interested at that price point. Basically, we were trading people up from within the channel. At $15.99, purchase intent dropped dramatically. At $18.99, it went back up again—way up. So, $12.99 was really good, $15.99 not so good, $18.99 great.”

The team learned that at $18.99, consumers were crossing over from prestige department and specialty stores to buy Olay in discount, drug, and grocery stores. That price point sent exactly the right message. For the department store shopper, the product was a great value but still credibly expensive. For the mass shopper, the premium price signified that the product must be considerably better than anything else on the shelf. In contrast, $15.99 was in no-man’s land—for a mass shopper, expensive without signaling differentiation, and for a prestige shopper, not expensive enough. These differences were quite fine; had the team not focused so carefully on building and applying robust tests for multiple price points, the findings might never have emerged."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger L. Martin.

"Try even harder"

No último livro de Roger Martin, "A New Way to Think", encontrei este trecho na introdução:

"When executives and managers find that a given framework, general practice, theory, or way of thinking—what I will call a “model” for short—doesn’t lead to the desired outcome, they almost automatically assume that the model in question wasn’t applied rigorously enough. The prescription, therefore, is to apply the model again, more vigorously. And when that produces the same unsatisfactory result, the prescription is to try even harder."

Fez-me recordar o "Drop your tools!" - - Drop your tools!!! Ou porque não era o verdadeiro socialismo

"value is maximized at the front lines"

"Understanding competition as something that happens around individual customers at the front line rather than as a war between organizations upends much of what managers assume, consciously or not, about mission, strategy, culture, organization, and decision-making. As I’ll argue in the following pages, leading businesses needs to be seen less as a challenge of managing organizational complexity and more about making sure that value is maximized at the front lines. This calls for an approach that is less inspired by hierarchy and more by respect for the insights of the people in direct contact with customers, structured and motivated not around optimizing the use of their existing resources and capabilities but rather around identifying what’s needed to deliver value right in front of the customer. In this environment, leadership must be focused squarely on figuring out how the organization can mobilize its assets and resources to deliver the biggest bang at the front line.

...

But in business, where competition is between products rather than companies, the line of sight between a CEO’s decisions and whether a customer will buy a product at any given time is much less clear. The individual outcomes of customers’ decisions are far from easy for executives, removed from the front line, to predict and control. This changes the power dynamics inside the corporation—who determines what is and isn’t valuable and how the rest of the organization relates to the businesses directly engaged with the company’s products and services."

Trechos retirados de "A New Way to Think" de Roger Martin.

Aprender e voltar a aprender, rapidamente

Outro legado do meu ano de 2008, a descoberta dos textos de John Boyd.

Ontem li "Why Do Strategy, Anyway?" de onde retirei:

"For me, the case for strategy centers on learning. I believe that doing strategy thoroughly and religiously is the key to gaining a learning advantage over competition.

The way to maximize learning in strategy is to use all your current knowledge to develop a hypothesis as to the most compelling strategy choice, then enact it, and then observe the degree to which things turn out the way you expected, then, based on those observations, develop a next generation hypothesis, which you put into action, and then observe and learn again. And so on. If you repeatedly go through that learning loop rigorously and, importantly, faster than your competitors, you will maximize your chance of ending up on top.

This is, must assuredly, not my idea. It is borrowed from what most insiders would consider the greatest air combat theoretician in history, the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd, creator of the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) Loop. Boyd argued that if a fighter pilot rigorously goes through the OODA Loop faster than his enemy, he will maximize the probability of beating the enemy in air combat. The key is the combination — rigor in each step; and getting through more cycles of the OODA Loop faster than the enemy.

If instead, while your competition is engaging in that learning activity, you wait to see what emerges in order to fast-follow, you will always be playing catch-up on the knowledge necessary to compete, and in due course, per Boyd, you will be shot down."

E volto ao cockpit do avião com uma avaria importante e à sua relação com uma empresa.

E volto à falta de fogo no rabo. 

“When do I know it is time to rethink my strategy?”

Um artigo interessante e com um bom timing, "Strategy in the Face of Discontinuity To Do, Or Not To Do?", de Roger Martin. Recomendo a leitura:

"“When do I know it is time to rethink my strategy?” 

...

In due course, nearly every company will face some sort of discontinuity. It could be a discontinuity in the business environment due to government change as with Peru. But equally, the discontinuity can occur due to the arrival of a new technology — the automobile, the transistor, the digital switch, the Internet. 

...

It is difficult for a company facing one of these discontinuities to know how to respond. It doesn’t want to be in the position of acting as if the sky is falling and totally throwing out its strategy when that isn’t either necessary or productive. But equally, it doesn’t want to be the next Blockbuster and be written up as the ultimate case study in sticking your head in the sand until you die.

To do or not to do? Do you significantly alter your strategy, or do you stick it out with the current strategy? That is the question."

Depois, Roger Martin apresenta a sua proposta de abordagem à pergunta seguindo a sua técnica: "what would have to be true?" 

"pensar no que poderia ser"

Algumas pepitas interessantes:

"strategy is a problem-solving tool. Its job is to overcome a gap between the outcomes we experience and the aspirations we hold. [Moi ici: Quando se está preso da rotina, não se levanta a cabeça para pensar no que poderia ser] That gap is a product of the current set of choices that has guided our actions up to this point in time, [Moi ici: Não há acasos, a situação actual é o resultado perfeitamente normal do sistema existente] regardless of whether that set of choices evolved implicitly over time or was the product of an explicit strategy effort.

A new strategy seeks to close the gap by means of a new set of choices. By definition, this needs to be a different set of choices, or it would fail entirely to close the gap that has been produced by the current set of choices. Because strategy is what you do not what you say, that different set of choices need to be manifested in different actions. Otherwise, there is no reason to believe that there will be any progress toward eliminating the gap. To summarize, strategy needs to produce a new set of choices that translates into action and, by doing so, eliminates the problematic gap produced by the existing set of choices.

The heart of strategy is the matched pair of Where-to-Play and How-to-Win (WTP/HTW) choices. There will be no elimination of the problematic gap between outcomes and aspirations without a change in the WTP/HTW pair. You can change one, the other, or both. But if you don’t change them, you haven’t changed your strategy choice.

...

What then is the planning activity that follows your strategy choice? You should create a plan comprised of three elements. First, it should specify and communicate the choices that you personally will be making and the timing of those choices (...). Second, it should specify the choices you will be chartering (...). Third, it should specify your own Enabling Management Systems  for following up on the chartered choices to make sure they are being effected and made consistently with your choices. This is why I argue that the wise and thorough chartering of strategy choices is one of the highest-leverage activities for any executive."

Trechos retirados de "From Strategy to Planning - What’s Next After Strategy?"

Mais pureza estratégica, mais rentabilidade (parte II)

Parte I.

"Can You Be Both Cost Leader & Differentiator?

Not if you Want to be Great over Time

...

The Playing to Win strategy question that I probably get most often is: why can’t we be both a cost leader and a differentiator? 

...

I think I get the question as often as I do for two reasons. First is that in advising on strategy, I emphasize the need to choose and in general people don’t like to choose. People like more to keep options open rather than cut them off, which is one reason why most strategy isn’t strategy, it is planning. So, when I say one of the important strategy choices is to be either a cost leader or a differentiator, people tend react by challenging why they must choose.

...

 To be a cost leader, you have to configure yourself uniquely in order to achieve a cost position that is meaningfully lower than for any competitor. That is what leading means. You can’t be a ‘leader’ if you are in the middle of the pack. ... The value of a cost advantage is that you can use it to gain share. The cost advantage enables you to lower price below the level competitors can in order to gain share from them, which illustrates the problem with being stuck in the middle. You can’t protect yourself from the cost leader (or differentiator for that matter).

...

In the face of competition, it is unrealistic to be both because cost leadership and differentiation take very different disciplines. A cost leader will choose standardization and will sacrifice non-conforming customers in order to maintain its meaningfully lower costs. 

...

Differentiators will pursue deep, holistic understanding of customers so that they can build the next increment of value into their product or service. They are always innovating and building the unique value and strength of their brand. 

...

Don’t waste your time thinking about being both a cost leader and a differentiator. Think instead about to which of these different paths you will commit and how to achieve cost leadership or differentiation in the space you have chosen to compete."

Acerca dos monopólios informais (II)

Parte I.

"How does a little monopolist grow its monopoly from a tiny one to a big enough one to be economically survivable, then attractive, then a money machine? It is by delighting its customers. And it isn’t altruistic. It needs more customers to get the economic model to work. And each customer benefits from the attempt to get the next one in order to make the economics work. It is a win-win!

But then the monopolist gets to the point of making the economics work, and beyond there, the monopoly becomes a magnificent profit machine. At that point, another customer would be perfectly nice, but who really cares? The monopolist is rich beyond its wildest dreams.

At that point, unless the monopolist remembers Rule #2, customers go to the back of the line. They just cease to matter. In fact, they become an irritation that gets in the way of self-actualization, which is the thing that really matters to the monopolist. And then the monopolist comes up with clever ways to make more money by abusing them. Sell their data to nasty people. Force them to sign restrictive contracts. Bias search results that they used to count on for their objectivity. It goes on and on. (The analog for businesses with only a small core of monopoly customers is to take those customers completely for granted while making luxurious offers to attract new customers.)

And then the monopolist starts the slow downward spiral. It is a very slow death. Again, the future is already here; it is just not evenly distributed. Customers will appeal to the government for help (ask AT&T, IBM and Microsoft). Or they will use a different device because it doesn’t use the monopoly operating system. Or they will abandon the monopolist’s service just to prove a point. In due course, the economics crater."

Trechos retirados de "The Two Rules that Monopolists Ignore at their Peril" 

Acerca dos monopólios informais (I)

Consideremos aqui o Facebook, a Apple como exemplo de monopólios. Basta atentarem no cabeçalho deste blog para lerem "monopólios informais":

"there is a huge incentive to attack the luxurious market of an existing monopolist — and innumerable companies do so. The monopolist must understand that these insurgents can’t help themselves: the opportunity is too attractive.

But taking on the monopolist at the heart of its business is rarely their approach. The dominant approach is to chip away at the edges of the monopoly. Think of the monopolist’s business as a circular disk. At the center is the perfect customer who thinks the monopolist’s offer is perfect. As you move away from the center, the offering is ever less perfect to those customers. And that is where insurgents attack: not at the center but at the fringes. And they win fringe customers.

When MCI and Sprint attacked AT&T’s monopoly, they didn’t attack the core of middle-American residential customers. They went after large businesses, who were being vastly overcharged relative to cost to serve, in order for AT&T to subsidize undercharged rural customers. Facebook’s insurgents aren’t attacking the core of its business. They are picking off customers who are hyper-sensitive to privacy issues (MT Social) or hyper-sensitive to ads (MeWe) or want to get credit for their participation (Minds) or they are searching for ideas/inspiration (Pinterest). If successful, that insurgent becomes the new monopolist for that niche — some of which are too small to be profitable, others not.

But the result is that the original monopolist’s territory becomes ever smaller as it is dynamically segmented around the edges. Ironically, the same thing happens in due course to the new entrants’ monopolies. So, dynamically over time, markets keep segmenting and segmenting into shrinking monopolies. It is inexorable."

Trechos retirados de "The Two Rules that Monopolists Ignore at their Peril" 

Estratégia não é "catequese"

 

"The heart of strategy is a matched pair — a place to compete where a company designs an approach that enables it to win. Sadly, most strategic plans do not do so. Rather, they make lists of initiatives which the company will pursue. You’ve seen the lists: improve cost structure, increase innovation, get closer to customers, rationalize IT systems, etc. Because strategy is seen as a collection of initiatives, often these get referred to as ‘strategies.’ I.e., “We have five strategies. They are a, b, c, d, and e.” No. A company doesn’t have five strategies: it has one. A strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions a company to win.

...

Lots of people (bless them!) read Playing to Win and find the five-box strategy cascade compelling. But for many, the instinctive reaction is to simply put their list of initiatives into the How-to-Win (HTW) box and call it a Playing to Win Strategy. In general, the items on the list are truly laudable.[Moi ici: Quantas vezes vejo isto...]

...

When you see your strategy development effort producing a list of laudable initiatives, keep pushing the thinking until you have a plausible theory of competitive advantage. Your goal should be loftier than just improving. The goal should be to be become better than anybody else: that is, to win — in your chosen space. And when you get to the point of a plausible theory of winning, do a thorough reality check on your Capabilities and Management Systems so that you can move forward with confidence that your strategy is real and actionable, not just a hope, because hope is not a strategy!"

Trechos retirados de "From Laudable List to How to Really Win" 

Acerca da estratégia

Relacionar:

• The Big Lies of Strategy
• What Gets in the Way of Great Strategy?
• The Death Of Strategy
• Your Strategy Should Be a Hypothesis You Constantly Adjust

No primeiro texto Roger Martin escreve:

"The last thing I’m not nuts about is the popularity of a couple of self-referential frameworks for ‘doing’ strategy. One is ‘emergent strategy’. Henry Mintzberg — one of the finest management scholars of all time — came up with the notion that strategy is more ‘emergent’ than we might like to think. What he observed was that with strategy, companies may think that they’re going to predict and organize the future, but often, when you look backwards, your actual strategy changed and shifted, based on emergent conditions in the marketplace. This is a great insight.
.
Unfortunately, some strategic planners have taken it to mean that ‘You shouldn’t bother planning ahead’. That is not what Mintzberg meant, and it is an unhelpful view of the world. What he meant is that the world will forever be emergent, and as a result, waiting until ‘what to do next’ becomes crystal clear is like waiting for Godot. He will never show up. You have to make some choices."

Outro texto:

“Your strategy is a hypothesis. Your strategy is about the future. It is a promise
Under uncertainty you cannot provide fully fact-based support for your strategy hypothesis and so educated judgment is critical. There will be performance trade-offs between your strategic options
The success of your strategy depends on the commitment and efforts of your relevant stakeholders. Conflicts of interests, values and perceptions of your stakeholders are inevitable; therefore, you need persuasion and influencing (politics) to align your stakeholders behind your new strategy”

Excerto de: Marc Baaij. “Mapping a Winning Strategy”.

" interpretations, not fact or truth"

Segue-se uma interessante reflexão de Roger Martin que se enquadra não só com o crescente radicalismo um pouco por todo o lado, como com os crescentes exageros da comunidade científica:

"As the world has gotten more science driven and data obsessed, the formal educational system is teaching certainty with ever more confidence. The message being transmitted to students is, crunch the data and you can determine “the truth.” And we wonder why political positions have become more entrenched! Instead we need to inculcate a belief in the benefits of balancing the manipulation of quantities with the appreciation of qualities. Because science requires numeric quantities and mathematical methods for manipulating those quantities to determine “the truth,” we intensively teach the manipulation of quantities—starting with addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, then division, then algebra, then calculus, etc. This causes our students to become highly experienced and skilled in seeking out quantifiable variables and crunching data so as to determine “the truth.
...
Very little in our formal education system helps students become skilled in the appreciation of qualities. It happens in literature, fine-arts, and design courses, in which students are helped to make finer and finer distinctions in the qualitative attributes of their subject matter.
...
As a consequence, we produce students who systematically lack balance. They are strong in the manipulation of quantities and weak in the appreciation of qualities. They are overly certain of the correctness of their models and their analyses based on those models and are equally certain of the incorrectness of opposing points of view. They are confident that they have looked at all data that is relevant to a position and that other variables, by definition, are not at all relevant.
.
We need to arrest these tendencies. We need to teach students to balance the manipulation of quantities with the appreciation of qualities. We need to teach them that their conclusions are interpretations, not fact or truth, and that alternative interpretations might be equally meritorious and/or contribute to generating a still more meritorious interpretation. That is the only way they will be prepared to work productively in a complex adaptive system."

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin.

"an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions"

A continuar a minha leitura de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin encontro uns trechos que me fizeram recuar aos anos 80 e à descoberta de Karl Popper:

"The job of educators should be to prepare students for a complex adaptive system, not to make them capable of operating only a narrow part of a complicated machine. We need to equip our youth for a world that isn’t about perfecting a machine but rather about achieving a balance—an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions. That is the only way we will produce the citizens that we need and the business executives and political leaders to pilot productively.
...
At present, the formal education system predominantly teaches certainty; that is, that there is one right answer and many wrong ones.
...
Despite humanity’s long and painful history of being shown to be wrong about what was previously held to be certain, we keep teaching models as if they are not models but rather reality—the true unshakeable reality, rather than what they are: the best interpretation of reality humanity has been able to come up with yet.
.
Instead, we need to teach students—at all levels—that all models are wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t be models in the first place. Rather than teaching students to uncritically adopt models, with all their implicit flaws, we need to teach students how to critically evaluate models. Even more important, we need to teach students how to build new ones. That is what human advancement is about: building better models.
...
Theorizing is important. It is what we do to make sense of the world around us and build models for taking action. But theorizing on the back of someone else’s interpretations is never going to be as powerful as theorizing on the basis of your own interpretations of real interactions with your subject—whatever that subject happens to be.
...
Rather than teaching students that data is restricted to numbers that appear mysteriously for the student to analyze, or teaching the accumulation of quantitative data via arms-length surveys, educators need to teach students that data, both qualitative and quantitative, gleaned from watching real people engage in real activities, is the most powerful tool for building better models for how the world works. Those models can be tested quantitatively to refine them. But the attempt to build models of our complex adaptive world purely on the basis of quantitative analysis of data will lead to narrow"

Ecossistemas, transitoriedade e a morte do regime (parte II)

Parte I.

Isto que se segue deve ser blasfémia para os crentes no Grande Planeador, no Grande Geometra:

"The actors in the system are continuously driving adaptation of the system. By the time we decide what to do, it is quite possible, if not likely, that the system has changed in a way that renders our decision obsolete by the time it is acted upon. And by the time we have figured that out, the system will have changed again. Because of that adaptability, our design principle must be to balance the desire for perfection with the drive for improvement.
.
In a machine model, the pursuit of perfection makes sense. It is sensible to analyze the machine in every detail in order to understand how to maximize its performance and, once that optimum performance level has been achieved, then defend against any attempt to change the way the machine works—because it is performing as well as it possibly can. At this point, any failure in the machine’s performance is likely to be interpreted as pilot error or not giving the machine enough input or time. This is what philosophers call a justificationist stance. There is a perfect answer out there to be sought, and when that perfect answer is found, the search is over. The task then turns from searching for the perfect answer to protecting the perfect answer against any attempt to alter it. It feels noble to aim for, fight for, and protect perfection.
.
However, in an adaptive system, there is no perfect destination; there is no end to the journey. The actors in it keep adapting to how it works. In nature, this happens reflexively, as with a tree that turns to the sunlight due to the force of nature, and by growing taller obscures the sunlight for those in its increasing shadow. In the economy, adaptation “happens reflectively. People take in the available inputs and make choices, and those choices influence the choices and behaviors of the other humans in the system.
...
So, although the pursuit of perfection may seem like a noble goal, in a complex adaptive system it is delusional and dangerous. In a cruel paradox, seeking perfection does not enhance the probability of achieving said perfection. In a complex adaptive system, it is not possible to know in advance the organized, sequential steps toward perfection. Guesses can be made. Better and worse vectors can be reasonably chosen. But perfection is an unrealistic direct goal, with the problematic downside of creating a paradise for gamers. As justificationists staunchly defend a system they perceive to be perfect, gamers are only given more time and space to enrich themselves at the system’s long-term expense."

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin 

"Her real job"

Um texto dedicado ao meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras e à sua preocupação com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0.

Segundo ele, e julgo que tem razão, quase ninguém se preocupa com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0, o foco está todo na tecnologia.

"While Grosso understands that part of her official job is to transmit a body of content from her head to those of the students, she thinks her real job—her most important job—is to help students become capable of thinking in a complex and uncertain world. To her that means embracing the messiness of the world and not attempting to simplify it for students as if students can’t deal with messiness.
.
That means helping them learn both how to build models (rather than handing them prebuilt ones) and how to build better ones together. She introduces them to the ladder of inference, a framework from business and education theorist Chris Argyris, which describes how humans reason, starting with selecting which data to take into account and then making increasingly specific inferences about the selected data—up the rungs of a metaphoric ladder to reach a conclusion on the subject of their thinking, at the top of that ladder. Grosso creates an exercise by which she writes different fragments of a story on a number of paper fish that she hides around the classroom. For example, the story may be about why she arrived at school grumpy one morning, and one fish may say “woke up late” while another may say “forgot marked tests at home,” and so on. Student groups go on a fishing expedition to find and collect the fish, and then attempt to come to a conclusion based on the fish that their group happened to find.
.
Since different groups find different data-laden fish, the groups come to different conclusions. Instead of judging which conclusion is “right,” they explore how collecting different data means that each group might come to a different conclusion. Grosso highlights that although we can never collect all the data ourselves, we make our model more robust by being curious and asking questions of others who may have access to data that we don’t. By rejecting the need for one “right” answer, Grosso’s students become more confident. They gain the confidence to share their thinking, because if their answer is different from others’, it might just be because they collected different data or interpreted the data differently, not because their answer is “wrong.” The process also encourages students to make and think about connections—between what they and other students know—so that they can integrate multiple insights.
...
Beth Grosso’s approach underlies the agenda I propose here for educators to help preserve American democratic capitalism and enhance its ability to sustainably deliver broadening and rising prosperity. The job of educators should be to prepare students for a complex adaptive system, not to make them capable of operating only a narrow part of a complicated machine. We need to equip our youth for a world that isn’t about perfecting a machine but rather about achieving a balance—an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions. That is the only way we will produce the citizens that we need and the business executives and political leaders to pilot productively. Currently, the formal education system produces overconfident reductionists who don’t see that they are operating in a complex adaptive system and are altogether too sure of the quality and usability of their piece-part solutions. The purpose of education needs to shift, as Beth Grosso illustrates, toward producing sophisticated yet humble model integrators. To do so, educators must do four things.
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Temper the Inclination to Teach Certainty
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At present, the formal education system predominantly teaches certainty; that is, that there is one right answer and many wrong ones”

Lembro-me da perplexidade da minha amiga Marina, que na altura estudava Biologia na universidade, ao perceber que tinha saído um artigo numa revista científica que desclassificava o que ela tinha aprendido numa aula na semana anterior.

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin prossegue.

Ecossistemas, transitoriedade e a morte do regime

Ontem numa caminhada ao final da tarde li:

"The service ecosystems perspective emphasizes that value is cocreated within multi-actor exchange systems in which shared and enduring institutional arrangements—interrelated rules, roles, norms, and beliefs—guide resource integration and service exchange. In addition to providing a systemic and institutional understanding of value cocreation, this perspective also offers important insights into how actors can intentionally influence long-term change within the complex service ecosystems they are a part of.
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The service ecosystems perspective not only provides a more systemic and holistic understanding of value cocreation but also offers important insights into how actors are able to influence value cocreation within the service ecosystems they are a part of. Like natural ecosystems, service ecosystems exhibit the quality of emergence and are, therefore, beyond the full control of any individual actor. However, actors are able to intentionally influence, at least partially, how service ecosystems evolve.
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What emerges from this theorization process is the conceptualization of service ecosystem design, defined as the intentional shaping of institutional arrangements and their physical enactments by actor collectives through reflexivity and reformation to facilitate the emergence of desired value cocreation forms.
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Ecosystems do not have an equilibrium steady state but rather adapt to instabilities by enacting forms that are uncertain and unpredictable. Furthermore, in recognizing the cocreated and phenomenological nature of value, it is not enough to focus on a single actor category (e.g., the user or the customer), but rather, there is a need to zoom out to understand the configurations of a multitude of interconnected actors who might all perceive the outcomes differently. In this way, actors may be purposeful in the forms of value cocreation they wish to influence, but they can never truly control or predict the outcomes of service ecosystem design. The first proposition of service ecosystem design summarizes the argument related to this insight."

Há muitos anos que trabalho o conceito de ecossistema. Julgo que a primeira vez que escrevi sobre esse tema aqui foi em 2007, "Subir na escala de valor".
Outras referências podem ser encontradas em:

• Agosto de 2016
• Março de 2017
• Janeiro de 2019

Em 2005 escrevemos no nosso livro sobre o Balanced Scorecard:

E agora, juntar tudo isto ao que vou lendo em "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin:

"The economy is not a machine that experts can fine-tune for maximum efficiency. It is far more productive to think of it as a complex, dynamic system, like a vast garden, within which we can all thrive if we tend it properly.
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A more powerful and useful metaphor for the US economy than a complicated manmade machine is a natural system, like a rainforest.
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In a natural system, the outcome is the product of the dynamic interactions between and among the parts rather than a simple addition of the outputs of the parts. That is, one can’t just add up the parts and produce the whole. In fact, it is often hard to identify what the parts actually are. A family is a system. It is not possible to add up the individual features of a family and predict its functioning, because the interactions make it too hard to understand in advance how they will play out. The body is a system. One can’t really divorce the functioning of the liver from that of the kidneys or the heart or even the brain, though modern approaches to medi cine often attempt to do just that.
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If the economy is a system like a family or the human body rather than a machine, that suggests that an approach based on managing the parts separately and simply adding their outputs will very likely result in a major dysfunction at some point.
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The economy, then, can best be viewed as a rapidly evolving and potentially unstable natural social system, in which intelligent players transact for their personal gain according to rules and processes that they design to facilitate those transactions—through laws, regulations, and the application of technologies. This creates the possibility that adaptive behavior turns into gaming, as individuals transact in the system in ways that suit their own immediate ends but subvert the system as a whole. And as we’ll see in the pages that follow, the smart people always figure out how to game the system and any attempts we make to change the rules in order to prevent the small number of smart players from walking off with all the rewards are doomed to end in failure."

Muitas vezes ao longo dos anos, ao ouvir certos políticos não podia deixar de sentir um misto de perplexidade e incompreensão. Como é que esses políticos se podiam arrogar a capacidade de terem desenhado a forma ideal de governar este país. Como podiam proibir os vindouros de alterar as regras? Como podiam pensar que tinham desenhado o melhor sistema possível?

Roger Martin deu-me a resposta: trata-se de gente que vê a sociedade, a economia como uma gigantesca máquina.

As pessoas, a tecnologia, o contexto, tudo muda. O que é verdade hoje, amanhã é mentira. (Nunca esqueço que a ala mais à esquerda da política portuguesa matou o rei D. Carlos porque não defendia as colónias...)

Voltando ainda mais uma vez a Roger Martin:

"Pursuit of all resilience and no efficiency is as problematic as pursuit of efficiency with no resilience. The only difference is in the nature of the death.
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Nonresilient systems tend to die explosively. [Moi ici: Como classificam um sistema que foi talhado na pedra como a última coca-cola do deserto? Estão a ver como acabam esses regimes cheios de direitos adquiridos? Não é uma questão de se, mas de quando]
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In contrast, inefficient systems tend to fade away slowly, as systems with superior fitness replace them. There is no way to guarantee the resilience of a system that doesn’t pay attention to efficiency. It may appear to be resilient, but it will eventually be overwhelmed by a more efficient adversary."

Trechos iniciais retirados de "Service Ecosystem Design: Propositions, Process Model, and Future Research Agenda"

Batota, um exemplo

Ao longo dos anos uso aqui a palavra batota para ilustrar o fenómeno de optimização racional. Alguém, a liderar uma empresa, olha para a situação, percebe os drivers do negócio e o que é a vantagem competitiva. Depois, resolve abusar dessa receita e aplica-a religiosamente.

Ao continuar a leitura de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin, ontem dei com uma estória que me pôs com curiosidade sobre qual será a solução proposta pelo autor. O que me veio à cabeça, no meio de um sorriso irónico foi o corporativismo de Salazar, o qual abomino:

"Consider the American waste-management industry. At one time there were thousands of little waste-management companies—garbage collectors—across the country. Each had one-to-several trucks serving customers on a particular route. The profitability of those thousands of companies was fairly normally distributed. Most clustered around the mean, with some highly efficient and bigger companies earning higher profits and some weaker ones earning lower profits.
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Then along came the late Wayne Huizenga, the founder of Waste Management Inc. (WMI). Looking at the cost structure of the business, he saw that two big costs were truck acquisition (the vehicles were expensive, and because they were used intensively, they needed to be replaced regularly) and maintenance and repair (intensive use made this both critical and costly). Each small player bought trucks one (or maybe a handful) at a time and ran a repair depot to service its small fleet.
Huizenga realized that if he acquired a number of routes in a given region, two things would be possible. First, he would have much greater purchasing leverage with truck manufacturers and could acquire vehicles more cheaply. Second, he could close individual maintenance facilities and build a single, far-more-efficient one at the geographic center of each region. As he proceeded, the effect—greater efficiency—became the cause of more of the effect.
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Huizenga generated the resources to keep buying small garbage companies and expanding into new territories, which made WMI bigger and more efficient still. This put competitive pressure on all small operators, because WMI could come into their territories and underbid them. Those smaller firms could either lose money or sell to WMI. Huizenga’s success represented a huge increase in pressure on the system.
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Like a collapsing sand pile, the industry quickly consolidated, with WMI as the dominant player, earning the highest profits. Fellow consolidator Republic Services established itself as the second player, earning decent profits. Several considerably smaller would-be consolidators earn little to no returns, and lots of tiny companies mainly operate at subsistence levels.
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The industry today is structured as a Pareto distribution, with WMI as winner-take-most. The company earned more than $14 billion in 2017. Huizenga died a multibillionaire."

Recordar este postal (2017).

Ou daqui:

"Imaginem só o que lhes poderia acontecer se fizessem batota, que é quando a gestão de topo de uma empresa pára e reflecte no porquê do sucesso e, resolve abusar, carregando a fundo nas vantagens competitivas específicas."

Ou daqui (2012):

"E, quando alguém descobre que tem uma vantagem competitiva, o que deve fazer?
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B - A - T - O - T - A!!!!!!
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Agir de forma a abusar da sua vantagem competitiva!!!"

Ou daqui (2012):

"- Mas o que fazes na vida?
- Ajudo as PMEs a fazerem batota!
- A fazerem batota? Mas o que é que isso quer dizer? Tem algo a ver com fugir aos impostos?
- Não, trata-se de ajudar as PMEs a abusarem e tirarem partido de algo a que se chama a imperfeição do mercado, a concorrência imperfeita. Lembras-te da história de David e Golias?
- Sim, mas o que é que isso tem a ver com as PMEs?
- Tudo, tem tudo a ver com as PMEs que fazem a diferença."

Há dias publiquei outro exemplo desta batota (atenção, a batota não se aplica só à competição pelo preço). Batota é o acto, a arte de abordar o posicionamento no mercado com inteligência e constância de propósito, algo muito raro de encontrar.