Processos vs estrutura

Já escrevi várias vezes neste blogue o quanto aprecio a abordagem por processos, a visão horizontal da organização, a visão que se concentra no que há por fazer, a visão que se focaliza na finalidade do trabalho executado.
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No número de Junho, a revista Harvard Business Review publica "The Decision Driven Organization", um artigo de Michael Mankins, Marcia Blenko e Paul Rogers.
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"Many CEOs assume that organizational structure—the boxes and lines on a company’s org chart—is a key determinant of financial performance.
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nearly half of all CEOs launch a reorg during their first two years on the job. Some preside over repeated restructurings. The immediate motives vary. Some are about cutting costs; others are about promoting growth. Some are about shaking up a culture; others are about shifting strategic focus. Whatever the specifics, though, reorgs almost always involve making major structural changes in pursuit of better performance.
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Despite the fanfare that usually greets them, however, most reorganizations fall flat. A recent Bain & Company study of 57 reorgs between 2000 and 2006 found that fewer than one-third produced any meaningful improvement in performance. Most had no effect, and some actually destroyed value.
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We believe that this failure is rooted in a profound misunderstanding about the link between structure and performance. Contrary to popular belief, performance is not determined solely by the nature, scale, and disposition of resources, important though they may be. An army’s success depends at least as much on the quality of the decisions its officers and soldiers make and execute on the ground as it does on actual fighting power. A corporation’s structure, similarly, will produce better performance if and only if it improves the organization’s ability to make and execute key decisions better and faster than competitors. It may be that the strategic priority for your company is to become more innovative. In that case, the reorganization challenge is to structure the company so that its leaders can make decisions that produce more and better innovation over time.
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The goals of the audit are to understand the set of decisions that are critical to the success of your company’s strategy and to determine the organizational level at which those decisions should be made and executed to create the most value. If you can align your organization’s structure with its decisions, then the structure will work better, and your company’s performance will improve."
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E se pusermos de lado o organigrama e as funções?
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E se nos concentrarmos nos processos que compõem o ser vivo, o sistema que é a organização?
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Recorrendo ao 'canvas' de Osterwalder, ao desenhar o modelo do negócio:
Em função dos clientes-alvo, da proposta de valor, e dos canais para chegar às prateleiras:

• Quais são as actividades-chave?
• Quais são os recursos-chave?
• Quem são os parceiros-chave?
  

Quais são os processos críticos e quais são os processos contexto?
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É nos processos críticos que são realizadas as actividades-chave e são tomadas as decisões que fazem a diferença.
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"Ultimately, a company's value is no more (and no less) than the sum of the decisions it makes and executes. Its assets, capabilities, and structure are useless unless executives and managers throughout the organization make the essential decisions and get those decisions right more often than not."
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Continua.

What to Do Against Disruptive Business Models?

Constantinos Markides e Daniel Oyon, no número de Verão deste ano da MIT Sloan Management Review apresentam um artigo muito interessante sobre trabalhar para diferentes clientes-alvo "What to Do Against Disruptive Business Models? (When and How to Play Two Games at Once)"

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O problema:

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"most companies are unsuccessful in their efforts to compete with two business models at once"

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"By attempting to compete with themselves, Porter argued, companies risk paying a significant straddling cost: damaging their existing brands and diluting their organizations’ cultures for innovation and differentiation.
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His view was that a company could find itself “stuck in the middle” if it tried to compete with both low-cost and differentiation strategies."

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A solução:

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"The primary solution proposed to solve this problem is to keep the two business models (and their underlying value chains) separate in two distinct organizations. That is the “innovator’s solution” that Clayton Christensen proposed and that has been supported by others"

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"Although the idea of creating separate business units has received a lot of attention, this approach by itself does not ensure success."

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"We have also found that competing successfully with two different and conflicting business models involves more than creating a separate unit. Several years ago, we studied the experiences of 68 companies that faced the challenge of competing with dual business models. Our main finding was that only a handful of companies that created separate units were successful in playing two games. Many had created separate units and still failed, suggesting that separation in itself was not enough to ensure success."

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Mas não basta criar uma outra unidade...

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"we examined 42 companies that had created a separate unit to compete in the new market. Of these, 10 were successful, while 32 failed. We compared the two groups on three dimensions:

• (1) the amount of strategic, financial and operational autonomy given to the unit (measured on a scale of 1 to 5, with high scores implying that decision-making autonomy was granted to the unit)
• (2) differences in the culture, budgetary and investment policies, evaluation systems and rewards relative to the parent (measured on a scale of 1 to 6 with high scores implying that these policies were very different)
• (3) whether the new unit was managed by a new CEO and (4) whether the new CEO came from outside the company or was transferred internally.

We found that successful companies gave much more operational and financial autonomy to the separate units than unsuccessful companies. They also allowed the units to develop their own cultures and budgetary systems, and to have their own CEOs. These are all policies consistent with the notion that the new units need freedom to operate as they see fit. However, we also found that autonomy did not come at the expense of synergies: The parent still kept close watch over the strategy of the unit; cooperation between the unit and the parent was encouraged through common incentive and reward systems; and the CEO tended to be transferred from inside the organization to facilitate closer cooperation and active exploitation of synergies."

Os Gestores Supersticiosos

Em Julho de 1996 a revista MIT Sloan Management Review publicou o artigo "Are U.S. Managers Superstitious about Market Share?".

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"Does the strategy of linking market share to profit really work? This investigation argues that there is simply no causal relationship between market share and profits."

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Em linha com um dos meus ditados preferidos:

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Volume is Vanity, Profit is Sanity.

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"Many U.S. managers are superstitious as well, particularly about business strategy. The false notion that higher market share causes higher profits has had a huge impact on companies’ performance, the associated welfare of employees and shareholders, and society in general. Unfortunately, corporate goals and executive incentive systems are often partially based on market share achievements. Business journalists evaluate companies by describing them in terms of market share, with the clear implication that bigger is better. And, every semester, marketing and strategy textbooks lead business students astray."

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Como escreveu Hermann Simon, "Manage For Profit Not For Market Share"

Querem apostar?

"BTW, recordo as palavras de José Sócrates na última entrevista televisiva que deu. Disse qualquer coisa como "Poupança. Que horror! Dinheiro parado no banco" " (Recordar aqui)

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Progresso na mudança de modelo mental?

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"Atitude de poupança é a “melhor forma” de combater o endividamento externo"

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Ou será apenas mais um degrau para confiscar parte do salário dos portugueses e convertê-lo, obrigatoriamente, em Certificados do Tesouro?

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Querem apostar?

Em vez de apostar na guerrilha...

... podiam apostar na parceria.

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A Centromarca não aprende!!! Aonde levam os seus sócios com esta abordagem?

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"Fabricantes esclarecem que distribuição vai manter preços à custa dos fornecedores -- Centromarca"

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"Distribuição pressiona fornecedores a assumirem IVA"

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Basta recordar Centromarca ou a série "Agarrem-me senão eu mato-me!!!"

Time to shut down the US Federal Reserve?

"Time to shut down the US Federal Reserve?"

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"Actually, Greenspan never got a Phd. His honourary doctorate was awarded later for political reasons. (He had been a Nixon speech-writer). But never mind." LOL, I know what you mean, here we have Vieira da Silva.

Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões (parte V)

Continuado daqui: parte I, parte II, parte III e parte IV.

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Voltando ao livro "Job Creation and Destruction" de Steven Davis, John Haltiwanger e Scott Schuh:

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"Like most people, policymakers and bureaucrats evince a reluctance to acknowledge mistakes. Consequently, targeted policy programs tend to persist beyond the point of economic desirability, and they are likely to be managed in a way that obscures evidence of policy failure. (Moi ici: Qimonda, Aerosoles, ...) Once again, this political economy argument is not new, but it acquires added force in light of the dominant role of idiosyncratic determinants of business performance. To minimize job loss and business failure - thereby helping to preserve the image of a successful policy - the least successful businesses in targeted sectors often receive more generous subsidies or other forms of assistance."

Acerca do deboche...

"Stimulus alone will not work because the U.S. private sector needs a debt restructuring. Too much consumption has been pulled forward and financed by too much debt. The result a horrible misallocation of productive investment to which we are now awakening. That necessarily means lower economic growth and lower income growth going forward – a situation which makes many debt contracts of yesteryear uneconomic. Debtors are simply too indebted to take on more. (Moi ici: está cá tudo)

And should the Federal Government continue to socialize these losses as they have done, we can be sure that a disproportionate amount of real resources will continue to be devoted to buying and selling houses or concocting financial products to sell to one another. And then perhaps the day of reckoning can be put off. Is that going to make the U.S. grow again?
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It is this lack of global aggregate demand (Moi ici: este é um ponto importante: ver aqui e aqui) – resulting from too much debt in parts of the global economy and not enough in others – that is the essence of the problem, which only economists with names beginning in R seem to understand (there is no R in PIMCO no matter how much I want to extend the metaphor, and yes, Paul _Rugman fits the description as well!)."

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Trechos retirados de "It’s the debt, stupid – Bill Gross edition"

Ainda mais uma vez: acerca da produtividade

Nem de propósito, ontem colocámos no blogue vários artigos sobre a produtividade, ao final do dia a McKinsey Quarterly publicava o artigo "The productivity imperative":

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"In the wealthy nations of the developed world, by contrast, low birthrates and graying workforces will make it enormously difficult to maintain what economist Adam Smith called “the natural progress of opulence.”
These countries’ best hope for keeping the wealth creation engine stoked is improved productivity—producing more with fewer workers. Paradoxically, doing that well across an economy is also the only way to generate lasting employment gains.
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We call the productivity challenge an imperative because the need is so compelling. But to eke out even modest GDP increases, OECD1 nations must achieve nothing short of Herculean gains in productivity."

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Basta olhar para o exemplo japonês "Japan May Wither as Working Population Reaches 20-Year Low: Chart of Day"

“Numa empresa dele talvez”

Grande resposta de Belmiro de Azevedo, ao nível dos tempos áureos de Pinto da Costa:

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"O ministro da Economia, Vieira da Silva afirma que se as empresas estiverem em condições de absorver o impacto da subida do IVA em 1%, que amanhã entra em vigor, o devem fazer. Em resposta a esse apelo, o chairman da Sonae, Belmiro de Azevedo, não deixa margem para dúvidas. “Numa empresa dele talvez”, enfatizou.

Belmiro de Azevedo pensa que as empresas não devem suportar nova subida de impostos e justifica.”A Sonae paga rigorosamente, “on time”, os impostos devidos. Não deve pagar mais nem menos, deve pagar tudo. Não faz sentido o Estado andar a pedir esmola ou a fazer favores à custa dos empresários. Já há encargos fiscais enormes”, disse o chairman da Sonae, à margem da apresentação do novo edifico da empresa, o “Sonae Maia Business Center”, evento em que esteve também presente Vieira da Silva."

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Trecho retirado daqui.

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Por favor, alguém que lhe tire a venda que continua às apalpadelas.

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Frases na sequência da sua tradição pessoal "Acham que a função de um Governo é estar a antecipar uma evolução negativa para a qual não tem ainda nenhum dado que o confirme? Se o estivesse a fazer, seria um profundo erro.""

Ainda acerca da Produtividade

"Redefining Manufacturing Productivity"
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"If the traditional definition of productivity is output per worker hour, most improvement efforts historically have been focused on the denominator in that equation: worker hours."
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""Over the past 20 years, manufacturing plants were considered outside the domain of the business itself," says Peter Martin, vice president of strategic ventures at Invensys Process Systems. "Executives viewed plants as necessary evils, and they focused a lot of their productivity improvement activities on headcount reduction."

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In the 1970s and 1980s, the investments in new plant floor automation and control systems were most often justified by headcount reductions. Productivity-focused technology investments were calculated primarily to reduce labor costs rather than streamline or reengineer core processes.
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As a result, Martin says, "In the '70s and '80s, we saw huge reductions in the headcount of field and control room operators. In the '80s and '90s, the focus was on automating maintenance, and headcounts in maintenance departments plunged. And, in the '90s and 2000s," he says, "the focus has been on engineering.
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It's gotten to the point that many plants found themselves below the critical mass level in terms of headcount.
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So the focus on reducing headcount as a way to generate productivity is over."
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Now, Martin says, manufacturers must shift their focus from the headcount denominator part of the productivity equation to the numerator: making sure the plant is operating at maximum efficiency, that assets are generating the greatest possible return on investment, and that companies are agile enough to recognize shifts in demand and to respond to them quickly.
In order to do that, experts say, manufacturers must leave behind the notion that the plant is a necessary evil, divorced from the rest of the business. Plant-level processes and systems must be integrated with the processes and systems of the extended enterprise such as sales, fulfillment, and procurement, so that business managers and manufacturing operators alike have better, up-to-date visibility into not just how well a machine or production line is operating in isolation, but how well it is contributing overall to profitability, return on assets, and production goals.

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With that kind of integrated view, analysts say, the definition of productivity itself will change. Rather than finetuning operations so that they simply pump out the most widgets per hour, manufacturers will be able to optimize, for example, on profitability or the ability to respond quickly to changes in demand."

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Não é fácil encontrar esta linguagem que pregamos aqui no blogue.

Reflexões sobre a produtividade

"What determines productivity?"

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"When Bartelsman and Doms (2000) reviewed the state of knowledge in this area a decade ago, one of the most prominent and substantive findings were the enormous and persistent differences in measured productivity across producers, even within narrowly defined industries.

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That some producers obtained twice as much output (or more) from the same measured inputs shaped research agendas over the past decade in a number of fields, including macroeconomics, industrial organisation, labour, organisational economics, and trade. Recent research efforts have been directed at trying to understand why these productivity differences exist and are so ubiquitous."

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"The new findings offer two categories of explanations for inter-firm productivity differences.

• One includes factors that operate primarily within businesses, be it at the firm, plant, or even production line level. These are potentially under the control of management or other economic actors inside the firm.
• The second set contains elements external to the firm. The impact of these “environmental” factors might not always be direct, but they can affect producers’ willingness and ability to harness factors in the first set. They may also influence the amount of productivity dispersion that is sustainable in equilibrium."

IMHO, o factor mais importante, intra-sector, para explicar a disparidade na produtividade reside:

• "Managerial practice/talent

Managers are conductors of an input orchestra, coordinating the application of labour, capital, and intermediate inputs. Just as a poor conductor can lead to a cacophony rather than a symphony, poor management can lead to discordant production operations."

Os jogadores de bilhar amador...

só pensam na jogada imediata. 10 anos é muito, muito à frente.

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"In the whole discussion about whether the U.S. should borrow more now when the interest rates are low, I miss one crucial thing - what happens when the debt comes due?
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Risk-free debt is really risk-free only when the maturity also coincides with terminal repayment. "

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Texto completo aqui.

Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões (parte IV)

Continuado daqui, daqui e daqui.

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Voltando ao livro "Job Creation and Destruction" de Steven Davis, John Haltiwanger e Scott Schuh:

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"First, the great heterogeneity of plant-level job growth and productivity outcomes suggests that businesses probably exhibit sharply different responses to policy interventions, even within narrowly defined industries or other sectoral groupings. Because businesses are not easily classifiable into sectors with homogeneous behavior, policies that grant preferential treatment to identifiable groups of firms can be poor tools for encouraging or discouraging particular economic activities. For example, when an industry successfully lobbies for import protection in the name of protecting jobs, some firms may not use the resulting increase in cash flow to preserve jobs."

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"the large role played by idiosyncratic factors makes it more difficult to discern the impact of policy interventions on the performance of affected firms."

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"the idiosyncratic determinants of business performance exacerbate the cost and difficulty of evaluating targeted commercial policies. As a consequence, useless or harmful targeted policies are more likely to persist over time before recognition of their inefficay sets in."

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"Debates about targeted industrial policy often center on the government's capacity or lack of capacity to identify potential winners. (Moi ici: Pois, o Grande Planeador, o Grande Geometra que tudo sabe) In our view, an even more serious problem with targeted industrial policies involves the government's ability to respond appropriately to economic losers. By their nature, targeted policies engender political constituencies with a special interest in preserving the benefits of preferential tax, subsidy, or regulatory treatment. Once organized, these political constituencies continue to press for preferential treatment regardless of whether the targeted policy continues to promote greater economic efficiency. Thus, targeted policies encourage the formation of special interest groups that, in turn, undermine the application of economic efficiency criteria to future economic policy decisions. (Moi ici: Como diz o miúdo do filme "O Sexto Sentido", "All the time!!!" )

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This line of argument is not new, but it acquires greater force from the evidence of heterogeneity in plant-level employment and productivity outcomes. The large magnitude of job creation and destruction, including the important role of births and deaths, suggests that trial and error play a central role in economic growth and in the evolution of businesses and industries. Put differently, large-scale business failure and job destruction are normal, probably essential, elements of a successful market economy. But targeted policies impede the trial-and-error process by inhibiting business failure and job destruction when such outcomes are economically desirable. ... Market mechanisms for dealing with economic failure are likely to operate more efficiently and expeditiously than political mechanisms."

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Continua.

E se eles realmente resolverem sair?

"Maioria dos alemães é a favor do fim do euro"

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"Maioria dos alemães quer o marco de volta"

Podiam ajudar e tirar a venda

"Vieira da Silva "preocupado" com impacto das dificuldades de financiamento da banca" na senda do marcador:

Nós também vamos precisar de um corte de cabelo

"Roubini says Greece needs orderly debt restructuring to avoid 'inevitable default'"

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"He argues that orderly restructurings, such as in Pakistan in 1999 and Uruguay in 2002, "are better for most private creditors, the debtor nation and multilateral institutions thatn an Argentine-style botched bail-out"."

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Vamos precisar e não vou ter pena de quem empresta droga a governos viciados.

Primeiro passo para iniciar a mudança

Acabar com as negações e biombos e enfrentar a realidade de frente...

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Não consigo imaginar um político da Península Ibérica com esta linguagem:

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"many people are under the “delusion” that just because the UK has historically been one of the richest countries on earth, it will always remain so.

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Only if we “reboot and rebuild” the UK economy can the country’s future prosperity be assured, he said."

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"“I think too many people in this country are living under the delusion that a prosperous past guarantees a prosperous future. But it isn’t written anywhere that this country deserves a place at the top table.."

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Por cá, ainda há dias, Mário Soares dizia que somos um país de futuro... por causa do nosso esforço e trabalho? Não, por causa da nossa história e localização geográfica.

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Que inveja...

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Trecho inicial retirado de "David Cameron: 'The world doesn't owe us a living'"

Somos todos alemães (parte VI)

Esta é uma afirmação antiga neste blogue, basta recordar "Somos todos alemães (parte V)"

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Sintomático que Merkel hoje a tenha repetido "«Princípios da economia alemã devem ser seguidos por todos»"

Está tudo relacionado

"Portugal entre os países onde o IVA mais subiu"
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"Sócrates é recordista europeu da subida dos impostos sobre trabalho"
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"O tira-teimas de 2011"
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"Sócrates discute crédito à economia com banqueiros"

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Tudo consequências naturais de uma espiral de degradação decorrente do estertor de uma economia socialista normanda.