Jongleurs, precisam-se (Parte II)

Parte I.

Volto ao texto de 2007 e à ideia do título do livro "A empresa negligenciada":

"A vida de um gestor consiste pois em gerir duas empresas em simultâneo: a presente e a futura. Se ele se limitar a gerir a presente (e não a futura), a sua empresa em breve se tornará obsoleta por via da alteração das condições de mercado em que está inserida. Se ele gerir apenas a futura (e negligenciar a presente) a empresa nunca chegará a atingir esse futuro. Ficará pelo caminho.

Sendo assim, a competitividade de uma empresa depende de uma boa gestão de curto prazo (a empresa do presente) e da introdução de saltos qualitativos (a empresa do futuro)."

Para o relacionar com uma estória retirada do livro "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt:

"One example of the latter was ‘OKCo.’ In 2002 OKCo was a significant manufacturer of home and business-office climate-control systems. The entire product line had fourteen different models. The problem, as they defined it, was low profitability and low growth. I worked with the vice president of strategy, who led a small team of analysts, and had periodic discussions with the CEO.

I gathered views of the situation from at least twenty different managers, engineers, and salespeople. There was both increasing competition and complexity in the business. What I saw was that the company's product line was stale and not up-to-date. 

...

The engineers who had designed OKCo's printed circuit-board systems had long since retired. To compensate for the decline in the product's performance, management had been lowering prices and increasing sales commissions. This was, in my view, not a good path to follow. It felt like working with the data-processing companies who stuck with old greenscreen terminals until the Internet and PCs overwhelmed them.

The vice president of strategy and I did a thorough evaluation of the company's products and competitors' products and interviewed a good number of systems buyers and customers. OKCo was a widely recognized brand name. Large systems buyers liked the newer competitive designs, but also trusted OKCo because of its years in the business. Smaller buyers and contractors were split, with many installers preferring the older jumper system-it took about twice the time to install, and that meant twice the chargeable hours.

In addition to these product and marketing issues, the company's organization was sleepy and self-satisfied despite the slowly declining financial performance. Outsourcing the manufacturing of parts and assemblies to China had helped keep costs down."

A empresa do presente tem os clientes actuais e tem a rentabilidade actual. Será que a empresa do futuro passa por servir o mesmo tipo de clientes? Será que a empresa do futuro se aguenta com um nível de rentabilidade semelhante ao actual?

Uma empresa sem pensamento estratégico, sem orientação estratégica, foca-se na empresa do presente e ao concentrar-se na satisfação dos clientes actuais, na prática pode estar a negligenciar a empresa do futuro. Por isso, é que uso a imagem do jongleur, ser capaz de gerir a empresa actual ao mesmo tempo que se alimenta a empresa do futuro. Construir um futuro passa sempre por tolerar a experimentação, por não esquecer a exploration, por tolerar alguma ineficiência. No entanto, vivemos tempos de foco no eficientismo.

Proacção versus reacção

"The discussion shifted between difficulties and actions. The three main action ideas were refocus the business on high-value crops, especially orchards, with the option of actually selling the large-farm portion of the business to one of the global majors; refocus research on the detailed chemistry of nutrients, developing the ability to customize liquid fertilizers to each crop, location, season, even time of day; and establish deep co-development relationships with one or two lead customers."

Rumelt em "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" apresenta o exemplo acima como o resultado de uma reflexão estratégica. 

O que me fez sorrir foi o facto do resultado ser muito semelhante, em termos abstractos, ao que muitas vezes me acontece com PMEs. Incapacidade de competir nos negócios de escala e margens pequenas, foco na subida na escala de valor. O único tópico que não me costuma aparecer é aquele: "selling the large-farm portion of the business to one of the global majors", mas só porque a coisa não funciona cá em Portugal. Se funcionasse tornaria muito mais proactivas as mudanças estratégicas. Assim, ocorrem mais como reacção quando se está entre a espada e a parede, motivadas pelo desespero.

Leite, a commodity

Continua a minha leitura de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt. Uma das coisas que gosto em Rumelt é quando ele conta casos negativos e explica-os. Para mim é quase sempre um alívio, no dia a dia vejo tanto coisa que não compreendo, que para mim não tem sentido, que às vezes penso que o problema é meu. Rumelt repõe a minha sanidade. Por exemplo, ainda ontem foi o suposto plano estratégico do BNP.

Um desses casos é o da Dean Foods, uma empresa de produtos lácteos, o maior produtor de leite nos Estados Unidos. Quem pesquisar este blogue com a palavra leite verá que há anos escrevo sobre o tema seguindo uma lógica contrária ao mainstream.

Ler Rumelt sobre A Dean Foods resultou em:

"Dean’s constituent parts were forty to sixty small milk processors. [Moi ici: Isto faz-me lembrar a Gráfica Mirandela. Se o negócio é volume, se o negócio é eficiência, têm de ser grandes unidades de processamento de leite, não muitas pequenas] Some were mom-and-pop operations; some were larger. The processors gathered milk from dairy farmers, pasteurized it, homogenized it, and performed varying degrees of separation. ... The roll-up gave Dean Foods more than sixty different brands of milk and butter, some fairly well known and some very local [Moi ici: Sessenta marcas?!?!?!] 

...

Since the late 1990s, fluid milk consumption in the United States had been gradually declining, on average about 2–3 percent per year, with ups and downs along the way. 

...

Dairy farmers as a whole generally produced excess milk that was often just poured into the ground. Milk prices varied with demand, the size of the herd of cows, and the price of feed. Demand was pushed and pulled by fashions for cheese, yogurt, and protein powders.

The fundamental problem faced by Dean Foods was that it wasn’t really a national company. Competition was local.

...

About 80 percent of all fluid milk sold was private-label products with no national brand names. [Moi ici: Custo, custo, custo. As marcas não têm nada a ver com o negócio]  Having a national footprint did nothing to increase bargaining power. 

...

To deal with this set of issues, the company sought to increase its operational efficiency. [Moi ici: A solução fácil, rápida e ... errada. Prolonga a vida da empresa ligada à máquina] It closed some processing plants and adjusted supply routes. It established a system of “key performance indicators” (KPIs) that measured performance and progress weekly and monthly. The KPIs covered volume, revenue, sales discounts, expenses, elements of cost, and customer margins by district.

...

Milk prices are usually capped by surplus production. Pressing the existing system for efficiency was not going to solve these fundamental challenges.

...

Beginning in 2014, Dean Foods faced a trifecta of problems. China cut back sharply on its milk imports, and the EU lifted its milk-production quotas. Russia banned milk imports. Surplus milk was spilled into ditches in the United States even as consumer demand took a downward step. The company doubled down on its efficiency goals.

...

[Moi ici: Entretanto, em 2019 a Dean Foods pediu protecção contra os credores] What could Dean Foods have done differently? 

...

Rolling up dairy processors did not solve the problems of excess production or declining demand. [Moi ici: Como não pensar no aperto que os produtores de leite sofrem por cá porque ninguém tem coragem de dizer a verdade e olhar o assunto de frente] Nor did it magically make a national business out of forty to sixty local processors. Dean Foods’ raft of KPIs could not make fundamental improvements in a host of local patched-together businesses. Measuring something doesn’t always mean it can be improved.

Had the product been pickles or corn chips, the original roll-up might have worked. But hard-to-brand, locally processed, private-label fluid milk?” [Moi ici: Como não recordar O leite é a commodity alimentar por excelência]

Honestidade e integridade, ou não

Em Sem limites na capacidade de gastar perguntava:

"Os gestores públicos são melhores que os gestores privados?

Na média são iguais, no entanto não têm limites na capacidade de gastar e têm de satisfazer mais partes interessadas."

O que os torna mais perigosos. 

Depois, dava o exemplo de uma entidade pública e de como a necessidade de agradar a todas as partes produzia um aborto muito caro para os contribuintes.

Entretanto, ao continuar a leitura de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt encontro um exemplo no sector privado. Primeiro, Rumelt conta que aquilo que se aprende nas universidades para avaliar projectos não é o que se usa na vida real, porque na vida real há mentira, sonegação de informação e fé fanática.

"in the real world, the largest risk in long-term investments is that the people proposing the investment are incompetent or lying.

...

[Moi ici: Rumelt conta a estória de Bradley, o CEO de uma organização] “Professor Rumelt,” Bradley said, “you do not understand strategic planning. Strategic planning is a battle for corporate resources. It is a battle I intend to win.”

...

The problem Bradley presents occurs whenever knowledge, resources, and decision rights are not colocated in the same individual. Once you have to ask someone else how to allocate your resources, there is a potential problem. And when you have to ask someone else to advise you on allocating a third person’s resources, things get even stickier. [Moi ici: As SCUTs vieram-me à cabeça] Consequently, the quality of strategy work is limited by the amount of honesty and integrity in the system. 

...

“In this case, the company was so large that the very senior executives would not comprehend the various strategies and projects that vied for favor and funding.

A system that lacks integrity will fail to utilize all of the knowledge and competence in the system and will act myopically. Bradley had an incentive to lie because it was not his money at risk. If the project did not work out, he would be first to know, and he would be the first out, blaming those left behind for fouling things up. If it did work out, he had much to gain. Winning such a commitment of corporate resources would be a feather in his cap and almost certainly lead to more power and pay within the company or elsewhere.

Although the board committee members were not knowledgeable about the technology involved, they were not stupid. [Moi ici: E quem defende o dinheiro dos contribuintes quando os projectos são escolhidos e financiados pelos governos de turno?] They were aware of the existence of behavior like Bradley’s, and they knew that misrepresentations are most likely to be about the more distant future. They would, consequently, discount promises about more distant profits, forcing the company to behave myopically. Insisting on a four-year payback was, perhaps, a sensible response to a system that has actors like Bradley making proposals to a distant uninformed committee."

"Thus, the concept of “industry profitability” may have no meaning”

Há muitos anos que aqui no blogue escrevo sobre o "Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões". Senhor dos Perdões por causa de um dos postais onde abordei o tema sobre como a academia vê os sectores económicos, blocos homogéneos, quando a realidade que eu vejo é a de uma extrema variabilidade de desempenho e postura, traduzida na famosa frase "há mais variabilidade dentro de um sector económico do que entre sectores económicos".

Recordemos alguns postais sobre o tema:

• Shift happens! - Novembro de 2014
• O triunfo da heterogeneidade - Agosto de 2012
• Qual o retorno da atenção? - Julho de 2012
• A minha tese corroborada - Abril de 2011
• É perigoso pôr catequistas à frente de uma economia! (parte II) - Março de 2011

Mais um trecho retirado de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt:

“Michael Porter’s “Five Forces” industry-analysis framework. This framework is based on the economic theory of “industrial organization,” or IO, which attempts to explain why some industries generate more profits than others.

Each of the five forces—the strength of competition, the ease of new entrants appearing, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of customers, and the threat of substitute products—is a threat to an industry’s profitability.

When employing the framework, you look in fair detail at each of these forces. Just looking at these facts about an industry can often help insight. But remember that the underlying model is about industry performance, not individual company performance. If the profit rates of firms within an industry are spread out over a wide spectrum, with some high and others low, then the five-forces framework is inappropriate. It is not that the model is wrong. It is a model of an industry of roughly similar firms. If your company is in an industry where almost all competitors are similar and are struggling with low profits and, especially, price cutting, then the five-forces framework is the right tool of analysis.

One issue with the framework is that most real industries contain firms with markedly different profit rates. Thus, the concept of “industry profitability” may have no meaning.”

Agora, lembrem-se das "amélias" sempre a pedir orientação ao governo de turno para o seu sector. 

"The politician arrives after the strategist's victory"

Rumelt escreveu um capítulo dedicado ao tema da coerência estratégica, "Creating Coherent Action". Nele faz um exercício que julgo já ter feito aqui no blog várias vezes. Por exemplo:

• Recordo Acham isto normal? Ou a inconsistência estratégica! Ou jogar bilhador como um amador! de Agosto de 2009
• Recordo No país do Chapeleiro Louco (parte II) de Março de 2022

Alguém com pensamento estratégico não pode pensar em querer uma coisa e o seu contrário. Alguém com pensamento estratégico sabe que é preciso fazer um trade off, rico mas doente, ou pobre mas saudável.

Rumelt escreveu:

"In companies ... coherence is the consequence of a deep narrow focus, assiduously avoiding product proliferations and growth for growth’s sake.

...

COHERENT ACTIONS SUPPORT one another. At the simplest level, coherence means that actions and policies do not contradict each other. In the best of cases, coherence comes from actions working synergistically to create additional power."

Depois, listou os 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals de 2015 e começa a exemplificar como alguns, muitos, objectivos, se contradizem entre si. Quase como o governo de turno em Portugal que quer sol na eira e chuva no nabal no campo da energia, ou como um eleitora do bloco a quem, no tempo de Passos, tive de explicar que ela não podia ao mesmo tempo ser contra limites ao défice e contra o crescimento da dívida pública.

"Having seventeen inconsistent goals is the indulgence of politicians. A strategist would face such an exuberance of inconsistent ambition by selecting a consistent subset and pushing the rest aside, at least for a while.

...

One sees how coherence is easily lost. The cost of coherence is saying no to many interests with reasonable values and arguments. A strategist tries to not be a politician. The art of compromise and building the big tent that everyone can shelter under is not that of the strategist. [Moi ici: Num país a precisar de reformas estruturais, num país a precisar de escolhas... temos a alquimia da negociação, os tavares desta vida com os seus estudos e observatórios. Só temos o que colectivamente merecemos. Como diz e repete Joaquim Aguiar: o povo tem sempre razão, mesmo quando não a tem: Lemingues ao poder!!!] Rather, it is coherence aimed at the crux of the problem. The politician arrives after the strategist's victory, sharing the gains among those who have won the day and those who stood aside. [Moi ici: Vêm fazer as reversões. Só que sem criar riqueza primeiro...]

...

[Moi ici: Bazookas] The United States spent about $2 trillion on the Afghan project. When large amounts of money are thrown at a problem, not only is there corruption, but each element of the military and each civilian government agency sees the opportunity to fund its own favorite programs. This, of course, leads to incoherence of action on the ground."

Coerência na acção ... recordar também os almoços grátis de 2008, Não há almoços grátis: Há que optar.

Quanto mais pureza estratégica, maior alinhamento e coerência das acções, maior o risco. Quem tem medo de arriscar ... Mt 25, 14-30

Sem limites na capacidade de gastar

Os gestores públicos são melhores que os gestores privados?

Na média são iguais, no entanto não têm limites na capacidade de gastar e têm de satisfazer mais partes interessadas.

Um exemplo retirado de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt:

"In 1972 NASA claimed that it could build a reusable space shuttle such that “the cost of placing a pound of payload in orbit can be reduced to less than $100.” In actuality, the system as designed and operated had an average cost per pound of about $28,000.

How did that happen? Like the case of Project T, the complex projections were cooked. People within NASA and its contractor community desperately wanted to justify a new program. Estimates of cost and risk were adjusted to Congress’s funding thresholds. In the process, they trashed the successful Saturn family of rockets and crippled the US space program for decades. The risk Congress apparently ignored was that the economic analysis was a fabrication. The fancy capital budgeting analysis of the proposed shuttle was a distraction, drawing attention away from the crux issue of reusability.

The design incoherence came out of committee thinking: to get approved, a project or program has to be all things to all people. NASA had wanted to go beyond the moon, build a space station, and explore the asteroids and Mars. 

...

In a discussion with an air force colonel about fighter-jet performance, I once asked what the “perfect” fighter would look like. He said, “The perfect design would have contractors in each state and a part made in each congressional district.” In the case of the space shuttle, it wasn’t perfect, but by the colonel’s standards it was very good. There was virtually no dissent in Congress—the very complex project had something for almost every interest group."

"a strategy is the exercise of power"

O capítulo 6 de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt chama-se "The Challenge of Power" e dá que pensar. Começa assim:

"Attacking the crux of a problem or challenge requires action. And that means making some activities, people, and departments more important than others. These shifts in roles, influence, and resources are the concomitant of focus, making some objectively more important than others. There is no escaping that strategy is an exercise in power.

...

A strategy is a design and direction imposed by leadership on an organization. Strategy began when people realized that telling warriors to ‘go out and fight the invaders’ didn’t work. Leaders had to impose a structure, a design, on how the group would fight. In a modern business, a strategy is the exercise of power to make parts of the system do things they would not do, if left to themselves.”

...

Despite the view that things "just evolve," strategy is an exercise in power. In a typical organization, if senior executives don't pay attention to anything strategic, most things will go on pretty much as before, at least for a while. People will continue to sell, factories will produce, software engineers will continue to improve code, and so on. Department heads will sign contracts. and accounting reports will be generated and audited. What will almost never happen is something important that is nonroutine, something new and different. It won't happen because important changes always mean shifts in power and resources. Strategy means asking, or making, people do things that break with routine and focus collective effort and resources on new, or nonroutine, purposes."

Vamos repetir o último sublinhado, "Strategy means asking, or making, people do things that break with routine and focus collective effort and resources on new, or nonroutine, purposes" ... Há uma citação atribuída a vários autores que diz qualquer coisa como:

"O que nos trouxe o sucesso no passado, não pode ser base para o sucesso futuro"

Isto implica algures ter de fazer um corte epistemológico. Um corte doloroso, quase como matar um filho... o que o peditório das amélias tenta fazer é evitar este corte. E sem fazer este corte não há subida na escala de valor, apenas migalhas de melhoria da eficiência, traduzidas em incrementos de caca na produtividade.

Uso a figura dos vikings porque Rumelt conta que quando avançou com esta explicação do que é estratégia, numa universidade sueca, os investigadores ficaram horrorizados. Segundo Rumelt, os descendentes dos vikings achavam que estratégia era o resultado da evolução natural, o simples deixar actuar da realidade.

Trechos retirados de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt.

"must be imagined or constructed"

 

"The move from diagnosis to alternatives requires audacity, especially in a gnarly situation ... Alternative actions are not given but must be imagined or constructed. Then you do your very best to choose among the alternatives you have created. Finally, you need to translate the idea into specific and coherent actions. In shaping and evaluating an alternative course of action, we have to make judgments. And to invent a solution, we have to judge, or assume, or believe, certain things to be true.

...

This process of diagnosing the challenge and then creating a response is the best theory we have for strategy creation. You analyze the challenge and your resources, and you try to think of ways to surmount the challenge and realize some of your ambitions."

Trechos retirados de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt.

Precisa de um pouco de fé

Formular uma estratégia é mais do que seguir a via analítica, precisa de um salto no escuro, precisa de um pouco de fé.

Neste postal de Outubro de 2015, "Do concreto para o abstracto e não o contrário", uso esta figura:

Esta figura na minha opinião, baseada na minha experiência, está errada ao começarmos pela Missão e Objectivos. No postal descrevo que começo pela outra extremidade.

Entretanto, ontem li:

"I encourage her to identify what makes her business different, or special, compared to its competitors. I ask her about the particular challenges and opportunities it faces. She replies haltingly at first, in generalities.

...

The key steps in dealing with a strategic challenge are a diagnosis of the situation— a comprehension of “what is going on here,” finding the crux, and then creating reasonable action responses.

...

strategy is portrayed as a set of actions directed at attaining certain “first element” long-term goals. But where do such goals come from?

Apparently, they somehow pop into existence. They magically appear before any analysis has taken place. If you haven’t analyzed your business, its competitors, the dynamics of competition, and more, claiming that you want to “be the technology leader” is just vague bloviation. It certainly does not help your organization understand how to move forward.

...

These kinds of intents and dreams are precursors to strategy, but they cannot all be accomplished, or at least not all at once. Effective strategy emerges out of an exploration of challenges, ambitions, resources, and competition. By confronting the situation actually being faced, a talented leader creates a strategy to further some elements out of the whole bundle of ambitions. Importantly, your ambitions are not a fixed and given starting point.

...

Diagnosis is the starting point in creating a strategy. 

...

In competition it is useful to look for asymmetries—ways in which competitors differ.

...

You don’t “pick” a strategy; you create it. Then you do your very best to choose among the alternatives you have created. Finally, you need to translate the idea into specific and coherent actions."

Trechos retirados de "The Crux - How Leaders Become Strategists" de Richard P. Rumelt.

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."

"Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: the difference and why it matters"

Procurem pelos sacrificados

E volto a "Strategy is the art of sacrifice".
.
Sim, concordo que qualquer estratégia verdadeira traz consigo algum tipo de escolhas. As escolhas que se fazem para servir certos clientes, ou certos grupos da sociedade, implicam, necessariamente, a escolha de não servir da melhor forma outros tipos de clientes ou grupos.
.
Dizer que as escolhas de uma dada estratégia beneficiam uns sem prejudicar outros, é uma forma de se perceber que o mais provável é não estarmos perante uma verdadeira estratégia.
.
Por isso, uma estratégia acaba sempre por ter de sacrificar alguém. No Twitter, via @amayfield. encontro esta citação de Rumelt em "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters":

"The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organisations often don't have one. And because they don't expect you to have one either. A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies and resources so as to accomplish an important end. Many organisations, most of the time, don't have this. Instead, they have multiple goals and initiatives that symbolise progress but no coherent approach to accomplishing that progress, other than 'spend more and try harder'."

Por exemplo, da próxima vez que um político, da oposição ou da situação, apresentar uma estratégia, procurem pelos sacrificados, ainda que estejam escondidos.

Confusões acerca da estratégia

"Even at the highest levels of organizations, confusion abounds as to what exactly is a strategy. Perhaps due to its abstract nature, strategy tends to mean different things to different people. It’s often confused with mission, vision, goals, objectives, and even tactics.
.
Failure to provide managers with a universal definition of strategy, and clear examples to refer to, leaves the term open to interpretation, creating ineffective plans and inefficient communication.
...
Professor Richard Rumelt describes the problem this way: “Too many organizational leaders say they have a strategy when they do not. . . . A long list of things to do, often mislabeled as strategies or objectives, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do.”

Trecho retirado de "Elevate: The Three Disciplines of Advanced Strategic Thinking" de R. Horwath

Do paradoxo da estratégia à psicologia, passando pelo preço do dinheiro e o horror a perder

Ainda na passada sexta-feira de manhã, a conversa, na viagem de carro da Figueira da Foz para Coimbra, veio parar a isto, ao paradoxo da estratégia.

.

A conversa começara por causa de um sinal que vimos na autoestrada, aquele que se coloca a 1300 metros a avisar que vai haver um corte de faixa. Um sinal daqueles custa cerca de 700 euros. 

.

Fará sentido, para uma empresa que faz uma obra por ano numa auto-estrada, adquirir um sinal? Não fará sentido haver no mercado empresas que aluguem sinais como quem aluga gruas?

.

Perguntava-me a jovem:

- Então, se o futuro for no sentido que diz, empresas mais pequenas e especializadas. Elas podem ganhar mais dinheiro enquanto tudo correr bem mas, se o mercado mudar, têm menos hipóteses de escapar?

.

Claro que concordei com o seu raciocínio. E tentei descrever esta figura e o seu significado:

Mais foco, mais pureza estratégica, maior rentabilidade e mais risco, logo mais mortalidade.

Menos foco, menos pureza estratégia, menor rentabilidade e menos risco, logo menos mortalidade.

.

Este trecho veio-me recordar a conversa da passada sexta-feira:

"As I was reading this book I kept wondering why organizations were so reluctant to employ a strategy. All of this thinking reminded me of another book I had read a few years back on strategy called The Strategy Paradox. What is the paradox?

The most profitable strategies are “extreme” strategies that commit companies to positions of either product differentiation or cost leadership. These extreme positions expose firms to a greater likelihood of bankruptcy by increasing the strategic risk they face. Consequently, the strategies likeliest to succeed are also likeliest to fail. That is the strategy paradox.
At first I thought organizations avoided good strategy simply because it was complicated and involved hard choices. The more I thought about it, however, the more I settled on the fact that people avoid good strategies because they don’t want to be wrong."

E isto leva-me a fazer a ligação com o capítulo 28 do livro de Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fas and Slow", um capítulo chamado "Bad Events":

"The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics. This is odd, because the idea that people evaluate many outcomes as gains and losses, and that losses loom larger than gains, surprises no one. ... The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. ... The brain responds quickly even to purely symbolic threats. Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention, and bad words (war, crime) attract attention faster than do happy words (peace, love). ... The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones."

E agora estas estatísticas retiradas do golfe:

"Pope and Schweitzer reasoned from loss aversion that players would try a little harder when putting for par (to avoid a bogey) than when putting for a birdie. They analyzed more than 2.5 million putts in exquisite detail to test that prediction. They were right. Whether the putt was easy or hard, at every distance from the hole, the players were more successful when putting for par than for a birdie. The difference in their rate of success when going for par (to avoid a bogey) or for a birdie was 3.6%. This difference is not trivial. ... These fierce competitors certainly do not make a conscious decision to slack off on birdie putts, but their intense aversion to a bogey apparently contributes to extra concentration on the task at hand."

 Como o preço do dinheiro está cada vez mais elevado, são precisas rentabilidades cada vez mais elevadas para remunerar o capital, logo, um desafio interessante em cima da mesa... o paradoxo da estratégia, o preço do dinheiro e o horror às perdas que permeiam a nossa psicologia.

Acerca da estratégia

• "Avoiding fluff is surest route to success":

"For Prof Rumelt, the kernel of a strategy is the diagnoses of a situation, the choice of an overall guiding policy and the design of coherent action. A guiding policy is an element of strategy, but is not a strategy until it is translated into specific actions. One of the silliest remarks in business is “strategy is easy, implementation is difficult”. But strategy that lacks a clear path to implementation is not strategy at all, just wishful thinking."

Acerca da estratégia

"A new strategy is, in the language of science, a hypothesis, and its implementation is an experiment. As results appear, good leaders learn more about what does and doesn’t work and adjust their strategies accordingly.
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a good business strategy deals with the edge between the known and the unknown. Again, it is competition with others that pushes us to edges of knowledge.
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Given that we are working on the edge, asking for a strategy that is guaranteed to work is like asking a scientist for a hypothesis that is guaranteed to be true—it is a dumb request. The problem of coming up with a good strategy has the same logical structure as the problem of coming up with a good scientific hypothesis.
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A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work. Not a wild theory, but an educated judgment. And there isn’t anyone more educated about your businesses than the group in this room.
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But in a world of change and flux, “more of the same” is rarely the right answer. In a changing world, a good strategy must have an entrepreneurial component. That is, it must embody some ideas or insights into new combinations of resources for dealing with new risks and opportunities.
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Treating strategy like a problem in deduction assumes that anything worth knowing is already known—that only computation is required. Like computation, deduction applies a fixed set of logical rules to a fixed set of known facts.
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The presumption that all important knowledge is already known, or available through consultation with authorities, deadens innovation. It is this presumption that stifles change in traditional societies and blocks improvement in organizations and societies that come to believe that their way is the best way. To generate a strategy, one must put aside the comfort and security of pure deduction and launch into the murkier waters of induction, analogy, judgment, and insight."
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Pois, onde está o conhecimento que resulta das relações amorosas com clientes, fornecedores, produtos e serviços? Como é que ele é introduzido nas análises dos macroeconomistas que querem explicar o presente e intuir o futuro?
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Por exemplo, qual a narrativa da tríade para explicar que as exportações portuguesas para fora do espaço comunitário tenham crescido mais de 23% no trimestre que terminou com Outubro de 2011?
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23% de aumento para fora da UE, 23% de aumento apesar de trabalharmos e pagarmos salários em marcos alemães!!!
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Por que é que nunca ninguém atira estes números à tríade em busca de uma explicação?
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Trechos retirados de "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"

Erros comuns acerca da estratégia

Joan Magretta em "Five Common Strategy Mistakes" chama a atenção para algumas lições que não devem ser esquecidas:

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"Mistake #1. Confusing marketing with strategy.
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Correction: A value proposition isn't the same thing as a strategy. If you're trying to describe a strategy, the value proposition is a natural place to begin — it's intuitive to think of strategy in terms of the mix of benefits aimed at meeting customers' needs. But as important as it is to have insight into customers' needs, don't confuse marketing with strategy. What the marketing-only approach misses is that a robust strategy also requires a tailored value chain, a unique configuration of activities (Moi ici: O famoso mosaico de actividades) that best delivers that kind of value. (Moi ici: Não basta pensar nos clientes-alvo e na proposta de valor, há que considerar o mosaico de actividades que se reforçam e entregam ou materializam a proposta de valor)

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Mistake #3: Pursuing size above all else, because if you're the biggest, you'll be more profitable.
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Correction: There is at least a grain of truth in this thinking, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. But before you assume that bigger is always better, it is critical to run the numbers for your business. Too often the goal is chosen because it sounds good, whether or not the economics of the business support the logic. In industry after industry, Porter notes that economies of scale are exhausted at a relatively small share of industry sales. There is no systematic evidence that indicates that industry leaders are the most profitable or successful firms. (Moi ici: O volume é uma adição medonha... já vi cenas que ainda hoje me arrepiam, mesmo passados vários anos. Crescer só por causa de vaidade pessoal, por exemplo, é mais comum do que possa parecer)
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Mistake #4. Thinking that "growth" or "reaching $1 billion in revenue" is a strategy.
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Correction: Don't confuse strategy with actions (grow, acquire, divest, etc.) or with goals (reach X billion in sales, Y share of market). Porter's definition: the set of integrated choices that define how you will achieve superior performance in the face of competition. It's not the goal (e.g., be number one or reach $1 billion in top-line revenue), nor is it a specific action (e.g., make acquisitions). It's the positioning you choose that will result in achieving the goal; the actions are the path you take to realize the positioning. (Moi ici: Gosto dos trechos de Richard Rumelt em "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy": "The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors. A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them." ... "Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.")

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Mistake #5. Focusing on high-growth markets, because that's where the money is.
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Correction: Managers often mistakenly assume that a high-growth industry will be an attractive one. Wrong. Growth is no guarantee that the industry will be profitable."

A inércia cultural

Na última terça-feira à noite, num noticiário televisivo, vi um discurso de Alberto João Jardim. Falava sobre as necessidades financeiras da Madeira e a insensibilidade do governo da república.

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Lembrei-me logo deste postal sobre Zapatero e ainda deste outro, ambos sobre o papel das experiências de vida.

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Do abstract do artigo "Shaped by Booms and Busts: How the Economy Impacts CEO Careers and Management Style" de Antoinette Schoar e Luo Zuo retiro:

"We identify the impact of an exogenous shock to managers’ careers, in particular the business cycle at the career starting date. Economic conditions at the beginning of a manager’s career have lasting effects on the career path and the ultimate outcome as a CEO. CEOs who start in recessions take less time to become CEOs, but end up as CEOs in smaller firms, receive lower compensation, and are more likely to rise through the ranks within a given firm rather than moving across firms and industries. Moreover, managers who start in recessions have more conservative management styles once they become CEOs. These managers spend less in capital expenditures and R&D, have lower leverage, are more diversified across segments, and show more concerns about cost effectiveness."

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Faz todo o sentido pensar no que isto vai representar nos próximos anos... no Estado.

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"Even with its engines on hard reverse, a supertanker can take one mile to come to a stop. This property of mass—resistance to a change in motion—is inertia. In business, inertia is an organization’s unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Even with change programs running at full throttle, it can take many years to alter a large company’s basic functioning."

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Trecho retirado de "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" de Richard Rumelt.

Objectivos proximais

A primeira vez que ouvi falar de objectivos proximais foi em Outubro de 2008. O conceito fez logo sentido assim que o ouvi da boca do investigador Pedro Rosário da Universidade do Minho.
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Quando uso o conceito nas empresas, as pessoas franzem o sobrolho, contudo, após a explicação, percebem logo o sentido.
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Pois bem, Richard Rumelt em "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" dedica um capítulo inteiro, o sétimo, aos objectivos proximais:
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"One of a leader’s most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective—one that is close enough at hand to be feasible. A proximate objective names a target that the organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm.
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a good proximate objective’s feasibility does wonders for organizational energy and focus.
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every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem—one that is solvable. Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to be overcome. To take responsibility is more than a willingness to accept the blame. It is setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve.
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In organizations of any size, high-level proximate objectives create goals for lower-level units, which, in turn, create their own proximate objectives, and so on, in a cascade of problem solving at finer and finer levels of detail. Proximate objectives not only cascade down hierarchies; they cascade in time." (Moi ici: E por isso, é que Pedro Rosário os usa para combater a procrastinação)