Outro padrão das minhas leituras de ontem:
"Once a business figures out how to solve its customers' problems, organizational structures and processes emerge to guide the company towards efficient operation. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets and distribution channels, and listen to (and appease) their best customers.
Such practices and policies ensure that executives can deliver meaningful earnings to the street and placate shareholders. But they also minimize the types and scale of innovation that can be pursued successfully within an organization. No company ever created a transformational growth product by asking: "How can we do what we're already doing, a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper?""
"Micro-enterprises, households and individuals are generating more and more economic activity these days. Meanwhile, the large companies born after the first industrial revolution 250 years ago are losing some of their dominant role as employers, innovators and producers.
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The industrial revolution was based on economies of scale – the bigger the operation, the better. Now ordinary people are challenging the idea that size is important. It's becoming easier and increasingly profitable to create and distribute goods, services and information outside large organizations.
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Welcome to this brave new world. It's global, it's accelerating, and it's a good thing."
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"Most big companies have difficulties coping with this exciting new world, for at least three reasons.
First, competitor analysis is much harder. The biggest threat to some firms might not be a rival company, but someone at home developing a prototype with a 3-D printer. Likewise, energy companies are struggling to react to the growth in home electricity production.
Second, controlling the corporate image is much tougher. Until quite recently, companies used traditional print and broadcast media to send one-way messages about their products and brands to consumers. But in the age of social media, companies are part of rapid global conversations that they cannot control.
The third and most serious issue concerns talent. Big companies will find it harder to attract the best brains if these bright people have a good chance of doing well on their own or in a small venture. More people want the option of working from home, but big companies are generally ill at ease with the idea."
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"This new age of micro-level production and services will shake things up, as all revolutions do. And the effects will be overwhelmingly positive. Simply by involving more people in the creative process, it will unleash an unprecedented drive for innovation. Whether people are alone or networked, using their own ideas or crowdsourced ones, they will find it easier to move from an idea to a prototype. Every sector of society will be affected: information, energy, manufacturing and probably also education." (Moi ici: Aqui Garelli estraga um pouco a pintura... claro que a educação vai ser afectada. A educação, para um cada vez maior número, não vai servir para embelezarem um CV que seduza empregadores, ou cumpra especificações. A educação vai ser uma ferramenta valorizada pelo próprio acima de tudo, tendo em conta as suas necessidades, aspirações e desafios. A educação não vai ser um produto fechado que alguém escolhe, mas um pot-pourri desenhado pelo próprio e que não se vai limitar a um período da vida, e os títulos vão ser secundários.)
"advances in automation and communication technology together with a more comprehensive cost-benefi t analysis argue for a potential reversal of this "bigger is better" trend - a radical shift to a world in which
effi ciency of size is replaced by effi ciency of numbers, in which custom built technology of massive unit scale is replaced by massive numbers of small, modular, mass-produced units deployed in parallel in
single locations or distributed geographically.
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there are many inherent flexibility benefi ts to small unit scale technology which, in the past, have largely been ignored in the race toward ever increasing scale. Small-scale units can be used in multiples to better match the output requirements of a given project and can also be deployed gradually over time, both of which reduce investment cost and risk. They also off er geographic flexibility; multiple small units can be aggregated at a single location to achieve economies of centralization (e.g. to reduce overhead or transport costs) or they can be distributed to be closer to either sources of supply or points of demand. An additional benefi t of small unit scale is flexibility in terms of operating output; having many units of small scale makes it possible to selectively operate varying numbers of units to better match short-run variations in demand. Also, with small unit scale technology, one can achieve high reliability through enormous redundancy and statistical economies of numbers.
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the fundamental decision processes surrounding the choice of technologies and their implementation need to be revisited.
Doing so, however, requires an entirely new mind set; educators, engineers, business leaders, fi nanciers, standards bodies, regulators (the entire industrial ecosystem) must learn to "think small." In order to reap the benefi ts of small unit scale and achieve the needed paradigm shift, institutional biases towards large-scale must be eliminated and knowledge about how to think small must be developed.
Engineers, for one, need revised training and new conceptual tools. In today's engineering schools, students are instilled with the notion that unit scale-up is a precondition for the viability of most technologies. So consequently, they focus on designing for scale economy. Instead, they must learn how to design small -design for granularity as it were."
