Hum...

"Fundo de protecção do euro viola constituição alemã e direito europeu"

A geração que fez o Maio de 68 ...

... vai sugar-nos a todos até ao fim.

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Só a Lei da Vida vai salvar os que vieram depois...

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"Dictatorship of the dying"

Inveja

"Germany focuses on cutting spending"

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"argue that by curbing spending – rather than increasing taxes – the €80bn ($100.3bn, £66bn) savings programme would differ “fundamentally” from previous fiscal squeezes and offer “noticeable, better growth possibilities”."

Strategy and the Fat Smoker (parte I)

Do livro "Strategy and the Fat Smoker" de David Maister retiro:

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"What is very hard is actually doing what you know to be good for you in the long-run, in spite of short-run temptations.
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In the past two-and-a-half decades, I have been trusted to see a large number of strategic plans from a wide variety of professional firms around the world, including direct competitors. What is immediately noteworthy is how similar (if not identical) they all are.
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This is not because anyone is being stupid, but because everyone is smart. Every competitor is smart enough to analyze the market and spot which sectors are growing and which are in decline. Few competitors get it wrong. Everyone - absolutely everyone - can see which services and products are "hot" and which are becoming commodities.
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What is more, everyone understands the basis of business success: provide outstanding client service, act like team players, provide a good place to work, invest in your future. No sensible firm (or person) would enunciate a strategy that advocated anything else.
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However, just because something is obvious doesn't make it easy. Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do.
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Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do.
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We know what to do, we know why we should do it, and we know how to do it. Yet most businesses and individuals don't do what's good for them.
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The rewards (and pleasure) are in the future; the disruption, discomfort and discipline needed to get there are immediate.
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The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve."
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Este último ponto "is not analytical insight but resolve" é fundamental... é, por vezes, desesperante, como reflectimos aqui: "O sentido da urgência", "Instilar um sentido de urgência!" e "Procrastinação e falta de sentido de urgência".

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Em linha com um artigo de Junho de 2008 da Harvard Business Review "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution":

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"Employees at three out of every five companies rated their organization weak at execution—that is, when asked if they agreed with the statement “Important strategic and operational decisions are quickly translated into action,” the majority answered no.
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Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own self-interest. In our work helping more than 250 companies learn to execute more effectively, we’ve identified four fundamental building blocks executives can use to influence those actions—clarifying decision rights, designing information flows, aligning motivators, and making changes to structure.)"

Para reflexão

"How To Fix A Sovereign Debt Crisis Without Killing Consumer Spending"

Ignorância e caviar, uma mistura explosiva

"Empresas de Terceiro Mundo" um postal de Daniel Oliveira no blogue "Arrastão".

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Nele pode ler-se:

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"Segundo o estudo, 61,3 por cento dos trabalhadores por conta de outrem têm até ao terceiro ciclo do ensino básico, 20,4 por cento têm o ensino secundário e 18,3 por cento o ensino superior. Nos patrões, os números mudam um pouco: 71,7 por cento têm até ao terceiro ciclo do ensino básico, 12,2 por cento o ensino secundário e 16,1 por cento o ensino superior. Ou seja, há muito mais trabalhadores com o ensino secundário completo (mais 67,2 por cento) e com o ensino superior (mais 13,7 por cento) do que empresários.

Como não é plausível que quem tem melhores qualificações tenha menos apetência para o risco, é possível tirar daqui outras conclusões. (Moi ici: Não é plausível? Com que bases é feita esta afirmação? Ver nota 1)

O que estes números evidenciam é que, para além de alguns empresários em nome individual que são, na realidade, trabalhadores por conta de outrem, grande parte do nosso tecido empresarial é de tipo familiar, dirigido por pessoas com uma baixíssima preparação técnica. Não sucede assim nos países realmente desenvolvidos. Não só as pequenas empresas têm menor peso na economia (Moi ici: Caro Daniel Oliveira o único país do mundo onde tal acontece, as grandes empresas representarem a maioria do tecido empresarial, é na Rússia, por legado da economia centralizada para os oligarcas. Em qualquer país europeu as PMEs representam a maioria das empresas e do emprego. Recordar que em Portugal as 1000 maiores empresas representam cerca de 8% do emprego. Ver nota 2) como, mesmo para dirigir uma pequeníssima empresa, é exigível algum grau de preparação." (Moi ici: Pronto, se o BE chegar ao poder as PME's serão expropriadas a quem não for doutor, engenheiro ou arquitecto. Olha, lá se vai a Inarbel...)

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Nota 1: "4. Os estudantes universitários portugueses demonstram intenções empreendedoras?
Os estudantes universitários portugueses, sendo os futuros agentes de desenvolvimento da sociedade e do tecido empresarial português, não demonstram grandes intenções empreendedoras. O estudo desenvolvido pelo Observatório do Empreendedorismo de Base Tecnológica (2005) mostra que 40,8% dos alunos inquiridos não manifestam intenções empreendedoras, sendo que 7% revelam intenções empreendedoras e apenas 5,1% revelam fortes intenções empreendedoras."

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Nota 2: "SMEs represented 99.8 % of all EU-27 enterprises in the non-financial business economy in 2006, employing two thirds of the workforce (67.4 %) and generating 57.7 % of total value added;" ... "SMEs employed 81.0 % of the non-financial business economy workforce in Italy in 2006, a share that fell close to 50 % in Slovakia and the United Kingdom;"

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BTW, por que é que só as empresas que não têm licenciados à sua frente é que vão à falência nestes tempos que correm? E empresas como a Qimonda?

Ideias interessantes sobre o turismo

Há tempos disseram-me que durante o ano de 2010 vão abrir 17 hotéis na cidade do Porto.

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Eheheh, há aqui muito 'optimismo não documentado' em simultâneo.

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Lembrei-me deste facto por causa de um título do Caderno de Economia do semanário Expresso de ontem "Há hotéis de 4 estrelas a €20 por dia em Albufeira"

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Trata-se de uma interessante entrevista com André Jordan. Alguns destaques:

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"Vê solução para as quebras do mercado inglês, em particular no golfe?

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Eu vendi os campos de golfe de Vilamoura em 2007, e já naquela altura, em pleno boom, defendia que era preciso criar um Portugal Golf Club, no modelo dos programas de fidelização das companhia aéreas, para criar uma ligação do cliente ao destino. Se a operação for impessoal, no ano seguinte o cliente vai para outro local, porque é mais barato. Mas ninguém aprovou a ideia: dava trabalho, era mais fácil trabalhar com os tour operators. Perdemos 30% do mercado do golfe, é preciso recuperá-lo com acções de fidelização, não a baixar preços. Há hotéis de quatro estrelas em Albufeira a cobrar €20 por dia. Não podemos entrar nisso, mais vale fechar."

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"Há sempre uma saída, temos de a procurar colectivamente. Sozinho, ninguém tem capacidade para disputar o mercado, mas juntos podemos fazê-lo."

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"Toda a crise é igual, parece que é o fim. Só que Portugal não acabou. E não é olhar a crise como uma tempestade no céu e ninguém pode fazer nada: temos de reagir, atacar o mercado."

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"Se ficarmos parados, saímos do mapa. Não sou burro nem teimoso, penso em termos prospectivos, acho que há sempre clientes aí fora, é preciso ir buscá-los."

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"Tem dito que não é com discotecas na praia que se promove um destino como o Algarve.

Já nem quero comentar o problema Algarve. Quem tem de fazer a promoção não são as regiões de turismo, são os empresários, os que têm o dinheiro no fogo, embora apoiados com linhas de crédito, juros baicos ou benesses fiscais."

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Alguém que sabe qual o segmento que persegue e que não se ilude com fogo de artifício.

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Outras interrogações sobre o turismo algarvio e I wonder.

É hoje!!!

Processos vs estrutura (parte II)

Continuado daqui.
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Voltando ao artigo “The Decision-Driven Organization” de Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins e Paul Rogers, publicado pela Harvard Business Review do mês de Junho de 2010.
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“The Six Steps to Decision-Driven Reorganization
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Identify your organization’s key decisions (Moi ici: Tendo em conta os clientes-alvo, tendo em conta a proposta de valor, quais os factores críticos para o sucesso?)
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Determine where in the organization those decisions should happen (Moi ici: Quais são os processos críticos para o sucesso da estratégia?)
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Organize the macrostructure around sources of value (Moi ici: Melhorar os processos críticos para o sucesso da estratégia. Faz muito mais sentido do que melhorar a macro-estrutura)
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Figure out what level of authority decision makers need (Moi ici: Para fazer com que os processos críticos fluam da melhor forma).
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Align other elements of the organizational system, such as incentives, information flow, and processes, with those related to decision making (Moi ici: Mais uma vez, a sinergia das partes do modelo de negócio, ou a perspectiva de recursos e infraestruturas encadeada com a perspectiva dos processos)
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Help managers develop the skills and behaviors necessary to make and execute decisions quickly and well. (Moi ici: Em função dos processos críticos para a execução da estratégia, quais as funções críticas para a tomada de decisões e para o fluxo dos processos críticos)
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IMHO: Faz muito mais sentido assentar a transformação nos processos do que no organigrama.

Um tema recorrente porque importante e actual

"When companies underestimate low-cost rivals"
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"Executives always regret it when they don’t anticipate the scope of a low-cost threat and respond forcefully. To be sure, a failure to see competitors is an example of the forces of “creative destruction” at work in capitalism. But companies alert enough to identify the nature and magnitude of the challenge will be in a better position to find ways to hold the new competitors at bay."

Uma lição interessante

"Lessons We Can Learn On How Stimulus And Jobs Programs Failed In Eastern Germany"

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"Today, the eastern German economy is still in a sorry state, and there are no indications that the situation will change. An estimated €1.3 trillion ($1.6 trillion) have flowed from the former West Germany to the former East Germany over the last 20 years. But what has that money achieved?

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Historic neighborhoods have been restored, new autobahns built and the telephone network brought up to date, but most of the money was spent on social benefits such as welfare payments. The anticipated economic upswing failed to materialize."

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Hummmm!!! Onde é que já vimos cenas destas?

Depois o burro sou eu...

Durante os primeiros 9 meses do ano passado utilizei várias vezes os marcadores:

• sei o que não me disseste na última campanha eleitoral
• moscas, por causa de 42 partes do título "Acordar as moscas que estão a dormir"
• desde que ouvi o ministro pinho dizer que a crise financeira não afectará a economia

Pois... depois o burro sou eu...

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"Maioria dos portugueses aguarda mais aumentos de impostos e não vai de férias"

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"