"what happens to organizations that get stuck"

“All too often, this is precisely what happens to organizations that get stuck. They return to the same practices and methods well past their point of effectiveness. Sometimes we’ve had our line in the water in the same place for so long we don’t even notice we haven’t gotten any bites in a really long time. To see problems and their solutions in a different light—to become more radical in our approach—we may have to fish in a totally different body of water, with different crew members and wholly new tools. [Moi ici: Como não recordar Zapatero e o paradoxo dos peritos]

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“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.”[Moi ici: Como não recordar "Beware of the invisible water in the tank"]

—John Culkin”

Mais um trecho retirado de "Remarkable Retail", desta feita do capítulo 19 "Essential #9: Radical".

O paradoxo dos peritos

“The more credentials somebody has, the more assumptions they make, the less they test them, the more likely they are to fail”

Um tema clássico neste blogue o paradoxo dos peritos.

“Expertise is powerful—until it gets in the way of innovation. One of the sobering lessons of the great transformations in business, leadership, and society in the last few decades is that the people and organizations with the most experience, knowledge, and resources in a particular field are often the last ones to see and seize opportunities for something dramatically new.
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All too often, what we know limits what we can imagine.
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Too many companies and leaders, often the best companies and the most successful leaders, struggle with what she calls the “paradox of expertise”—the frustrating reality that the more deeply immersed you are in a market, a product category, or a technology, the harder it becomes to open your mind to new business models that may reshape that market or promising ways to leapfrog that technology. Past results may not be the enemy of subsequent breakthroughs, but they can constrain the capacity to grasp the future.
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“When it comes to innovation,” she argues, “the same hard-won experience, best practices, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it. Said another way, the weight of what we know, especially what we collectively ‘know,’ kills innovation. . . . Why can knowledge and experience be so lethal to innovation? Because when we become expert, we often trade our ‘what if’ flights of fancy for the grounded reality of ‘what is.’” ”

Recordo sempre:

• O suíço que entrou no mundo do azeite;
• Os gurus que influenciam (um festival de 28 cromos);
• Zapatero; e 
• Gary Klein

"nós não vemos através dos nossos olhos mas através das nossas experiências", e "as nossas experiências produzem modelos mentais", modelos mentais que nos ajudam a perceber e a actuar sobre a realidade. A experiência é uma vantagem até... deixar de ser.
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E quando é que a experiência deixa de ser uma vantagem?
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Quando a realidade muda!"

Trechos retirados de “Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways” de  William C. Taylor.

Tantos políticos prisioneiros do argumento "Groundhog Day"

Outro recorte retirado de "Strategy as a Wicked Problem":

"Companies design planning systems to work based on feedback; they compare results with plans and take corrective actions. Though it’s a powerful source of learning, feedback has limited relevance in a wicked context. Feedback allows enterprises to refine fundamentally sound strategies; wicked problems require executives to come up with novel ones. Feedback helps people learn from the past; wicked problems arise from unanticipated, uncertain, and unclear futures. Feedback helps people learn in contexts such as the movie Groundhog Day, where the protagonist (Phil Connors) encounters the same set of circumstances every day, which enables him to perfect his responses over time. Wicked problems arise in circumstances such as those in the TV series Quantum Leap, where the protagonist (Sam Beckett) finds himself in an unfamiliar time and place in each episode. Comprehending the challenge he faces is itself the initial problem..To develop a feed-forward orientation as a complement to the feedback practices they currently use, corporations must learn to envision the future. In this variation of scenario planning, enterprises should describe the set of external and internal circumstances that they would like to see in the next 10, 20, or 50 years. This will open executives’ minds to the range and unpredictability of possibilities that the future may bring. Enterprises must then pursue strategies that will increase the likelihood of those circumstances’ becoming reality."

Recordar "Parte VII – Zapatero e os outros."
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Tanta gente na política que ainda continua com o mindset do tempo da vida fácil...

Em pânico

Quando leio "Rajoy: "Há instituições em Espanha que nem sequer conseguem financiar-se" penso:

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- Este tipo está em pânico!
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Depois, vou buscar o "Deep Survival" de Laurence Gonzales e escolho meio dúzia de citações que suportam a minha conclusão:

"The first lesson is to remain calm, not to panic. Because emotions are called “hot cognitions,” this is known as “being cool.”
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Only 10 to 20 percent of people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency. They are the ones who can perceive their situation clearly; they can plan and take correct action, all of which are key elements of survival. Confronted with a changing environment, they rapidly adapt.
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You’re sitting there sucking oxygen, you’d better have a plan. Because if you don’t, you’re screwed, and then you’re fucked.
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The first rule is: Face reality. Good survivors aren’t immune to fear. They know what’s happening, and it does “scare the living shit out of” them. It’s all a question of what you do next.
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Survivors “laugh at threats… playing and laughing go together. Playing keeps the person in contact with what is happening around [him].” To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such. … if you let yourself get too serious, you will get too scared, and once that devil is out of the bottle, you’re on a runaway horse. Fear is good [Fear puts me in my place. It gives me the humility to see things as they are]. Too much fear is not."

Percebo perfeitamente porque é que Camilo Lourenço, esta manhã,  confessou ter saudades de Zapatero, apesar de nada tenha feito no seu consulado para evitar o desastre.

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.

Pobres espanhóis...

Primeiro quem lá foi foram os gregos.
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Nós fomos lá em Dezembro "Teixeira dos Santos está na China a vender dívida pública"... and now, apertem bem os cintos, the one and only... ZPARO
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"Zapatero asks for funds while claiming Spain needs no bailout"

Uma anedota

As 1000 maiores empresas portuguesas representam apenas cerca de 8% do emprego.
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Em Espanha o panorama não é muito diferente, como o demonstra o quadro 1 deste documento.
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Por isso, é incompreensível que um primeiro-ministro acredite que consegue alguma coisa falando com 25 empresas... mais um que não percebe que são as milhares de empresas anónimas que fazem a diferença, mais um que acredita em PINs
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Capa do El País de ontem:

Espanha, Espanha, Espanha

É deprimente ler notícias de Espanha e perceber a embrulhada em que estão metidos ... com um governo que ... sem comentários.

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Este artigo da Bloomberg é de fazer chorar "Bullrings, Theme Park Can’t Stop 20% Spanish Jobless" até apetece perguntar se Zapatero e Bettencourt Resendes não são uma e a mesma pessoa dado o prafrentismos com que abordam as questões económicas. Não selecciono nenhum trecho em particular porque todo o artigo é um must, um hino ao deboche despesista, à orgia de dívida, à loucura irracional de pensar que esta crise era um episódio curto e que dentro em breve tudo voltaria ao normal.

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Outro artigo a reler para ficar aparvallhado com o nível a que a coisa chegou em Espanha é este do The Economist "Unsustainable". A ministra das finanças espanhola também saiu um cromo de caderneta (tipo: bacalhau, cabrito e cobaia do meu tempo de criança):

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"As Elena Salgado, the finance minister, claims, this gives the system a certain flexibility. But it is bad for productivity. Inefficient workers on permanent contracts are protected. There is no incentive to train the young and the temporary."

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Assim, segundo a ministra: A baixa produtividade espanhola deve-se a uma legislação laboral que protege os trabalhadores ineficientes...

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Existem trabalhadores ineficientes que são protegidos pela legislação laboral? Sim existem! Está aí a causa da baixa produtividade espanhola? Não!!!!!!!

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Tal como Vanzeller e Ferraz da Costa, a ministra concentra-se no "como produzir", foca-se nos custos, olha para o denominador da equação da produtividade. Quando, IMHO, o problema está na decisão sobre o que produzir (decisão que não cabe aos trabalhadores), quando a solução está na criação de valor, quando há que olhar para o numerador.

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