"Motivational focus affects how we approach life’s challenges and demands. Promotion-focused people see their goals as creating a path to gain or advancement and concentrate on the rewards that will accrue when they achieve them. Promotion-focused people are comfortable taking chances, like to work quickly, dream big and think creatively.
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for the promotion-focused, the worst thing is a chance not taken, a reward unearned, a failure to advance.
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Prevention-focused people, in contrast, see their goals as responsibilities, and they concentrate on staying safe. They worry about what might go wrong if they don’t work hard enough or aren’t careful enough. They are vigilant and play to not lose, to hang on to what they have, to maintain the status quo.
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Sometimes even minor tweaks in how you think about a goal or the language you use to describe it can make a difference.
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Your aspiration is to score at least three times.” Or “You are going to shoot five penalties. Your obligation is to not miss more than twice.” You probably wouldn’t expect a small change in wording to affect these practiced, highly motivated players.
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But it had a big impact. Players did significantly better when the instructions were framed to match their dominant motivational focus, which the researchers had previously measured. This was especially true for prevention-minded players, who scored nearly twice as often when they received the don’t-miss instructions.
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Promotion-focused people tend to increase their efforts when a supervisor offers them praise for excellent work, whereas prevention-focused people are more responsive to criticism and the looming possibility of failure."
"In 1980, China and India together accounted for less than 5% of global output. Last year, the two were responsible for over 20% of world GDP. The transition from the one figure to the other was responsible for massive and highly disruptive changes across the global economy. The world trade order has been stood on its ear. The movement of hundreds of millions of new workers into global labour markets has had an enormous impact on real wage growth and real interest rates and, consequently, on innovation and investment. The strain on supplies of all sorts of goods and resources, from oil and gold to wine and art, has generated wild price gyrations and remarkable economic knock-on effects in producing and consuming countries.Gostava que mais gente partilhasse desta perspectiva e pudesse equacionar hipotéticos futuros e hipotéticas assimetrias a aproveitar.
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It is this era of major and disruptive economic transformation that seems to be at an end.
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The era of disruptive BRIC ascendence is over. What that might mean for advanced economies is very tough to say. It could mean better times ahead for workers who experienced a steady erosion in their bargaining power over the past three decades. Unless, that is, the main effect of cheap emerging market labour was to delay labour-saving technical change. Commodity prices could be in for a long period of stagnation as slowing demand growth from emerging markets interacts with soaring supply.
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What comes next isn't clear, but the world does appear to be entering a new phase of global growth."
"Com os números do desemprego em Portugal a atingirem os 17,5% - o nível mais alto dos últimos 27 anos -, há números que trazem esperança: mais de 60% do novo emprego, criado entre 2007 e 2011, foi responsabilidade das pequenas empresas, com um número de empregados igual ou inferior a 50 pessoas; as empresas jovens, com idade igual ou inferior a cinco anos, já representam 46% do emprego criado em cada ano. E as ‘start-ups', nascidas em cada ano, representam 6,5% do tecido empresarial, mas são responsáveis, em média, por 18% do emprego criado em cada ano."Associado a este mesmo tema, recordo o artigo "Onde está a nascer o novo emprego?" no Caderno de Economia do Expresso do passado Sábado, que termina associando-se à nossa metáfora de Mongo como um mundo de artesãos e de prosumers:
"o crescimento económico de um país está directamente ligado ao número de empreendedores que consegue criar", concluindo que "nada é mais humano do que a criação de coisas. O empreendedorismo é o fim último da humanidade".
"It may well be that the uncertainty principle, along with other curious aspects of quantum theory, is another such interstice of unreason, a reminder not that the world we know is false, but that it is always the world as we observe it."Trecho retirado de "On Borges, Particles and the Paradox of the Perceived"
"You can’t run service operations like a factory, because customers just walk onto the factory floor and mess everything up. They interfere. You can’t schedule when they show up. They just come in massive waves at the most inconvenient times. Then they get angry when they have to wait. Why can’t they make an appointment? They don’t understand how things work, so you have to train them to use the equipment. Sometimes they can be really slow to figure things out.Trechos do Capítulo 4, "Services are complex", do livro "The Connected Company" de Dave Gray.
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They ask for things that aren’t on the menu. They want everything to be customized and personalized for them. They have no interest in efficient operations.
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They don’t follow the processes we lay out for them.
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And customers want to get on with their days. They don’t want to wait in the waiting room or stay on hold for the next customer representative. They want services to be convenient for them.
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As customers, competitors, and partners make adaptive moves and countermoves, they not only affect each other but they affect the landscape itself, so an organization that was fit for yesterday’s world cannot be certain that they will be fit for tomorrow’s world. Our companies have all been optimized for a perfect one-way stream, the line of production, and these pesky customers are mucking about in our operations, and we have now a completely different problem to solve. We need to optimize not for the line of production but for the line of interaction, the front line - the edge of the organization - where our people and systems come into direct contact with customers. It’s a whole different thing.
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Many service companies just aren’t designed for service delivery. They are designed like factories, optimized for the mass production of inputs into outputs. This makes perfect sense in a rapidly-industrializing economy. But in an economy where manufacturing is shrinking and services are expanding, it doesn’t work anymore. Traditional management thinking looks at a customer service call as an input to the service factory. For a factory, it’s not difficult to get standard inputs from suppliers. But inputs from customers come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Every problem, every job that customers need to do, has its own unique profile. Most companies try to standardize these inputs as much as possible so they can process them efficiently. The factory’s job is to produce “resolutions.” This is how we end up with complicated voice menu systems that attempt to route calls to the appropriate department while keeping costs as low as possible. As companies try to fit customer demands into standard boxes, customers become frustrated and angry. They give up. Sometimes they leave to find another provider, but even then they often hold little hope that anything will change."
"1) Get Personal: Cohorts with shared demography, like Hispanic consumers, are too large to treat as a monolith. You need to drill down to understand the needs of sub-cohorts.Esta última frase "It starts with asking customers who they are, not just what they want."
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4) Look at Whom You're Excluding: If your company focuses on selling consumer electronics to men under 35, for example, pause and consider who feels unfairly excluded from the marketing narrative, such as baby boomer consumers aged 46-64 who spend more on technology than any other demographic. A good example of this marketing reorientation comes from the video gaming industry, which is finally waking up to the fact that their ads were alienating the 47% of "girl gamers" who buy their products.
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6) Start with Empathy: If you pay attention to your customers, and treat them with consideration, they'll reward you. If you don't, they won't. Good marketers like Apple remember that spending is emotional. It starts with asking customers who they are, not just what they want."
"To crystallize, take this description of an option:Acho que é isto que eu vejo em "assistia do seu acampamento, amedrontado, acobardado, aos desafios arrogantes do gigante Golias e..." e que permite fugir do atractor do feddback-loop que rebola encosta abaixo como uma avalanche.
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Option = asymmetry + rationality.
The rationality part lies in keeping what is good and ditching the bad, knowing to take the profits. As we saw, nature has a filter to keep the good baby and get rid of the bad. The difference between the antifragile and the fragile lies there. The fragile has no option. But the antifragile needs to select what’s best—the best option.
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Unlike the researcher afraid of doing something different, it sees an option - the asymmetry - when there is one. So it ratchets up - biological systems get locked in a state that is better than the previous one, the path-dependent property I mentioned earlier. In trial and error, the rationality consists in not rejecting something that is markedly better than what you had before.
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An option hides where we don’t want it to hide. I will repeat that options benefit from variability, but also from situations in which errors carry small costs. So these errors are like options—in the long run, happy errors bring gains, unhappy errors bring losses."
"The Memoto camera can be clipped to your clothing or worn on a chain around your neck. There is no shutter release, no display and no on-off button. The camera simply takes a picture automatically every 30 seconds, which comes to 120 pictures an hour or 2,880 a day. To stop the camera, you have to put it in your pocket. For each photo, the device stores the time and the GPS coordinates of where it was taken. The result is a giant photo diary, or "Lifelog," a term coined by the web community.Trecho retirado de "Total Recall: Mini-Camera Records All (and Perhaps Too Much)"
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Naturally, the images don't remain in the camera. The Memoto app transfers them to the company's server or, more precisely, to a server Memoto rents from Amazon in the United States to store its customers' data.
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The Memoto software sorts the photos, organizes them by subject and time, and highlights the best ones from a technical standpoint. The user can then use his or her own computer or smartphone to look at current pictures, search for old ones or post images to a social-networking site, such as Facebook.
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These features make Memoto the ideal toy for people who have made online self-expression their mission in life. If the idea takes hold, there will be no events in the future that don't exist in image form. Forgetting will become a thing of the past, and we will no longer be able to sugarcoat our past experiences. Memory will no longer be subjective, but merely an image file on an Amazon server."
"Business plans with too much detail, books with too much proof, politicians with too much granularity... it seems as though more data is a good thing, because data proves the case.E recordei logo John Kotter em "The Heart of Change":
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In my experience, data crowds out faith. And without faith, it's hard to believe in the data enough to make a leap. Big mergers, big VC investments, big political movements, large congregations... they don't usually turn out for a spreadsheet.
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The problem is this: no spreadsheet, no bibliography and no list of resources is sufficient proof to someone who chooses not to believe. The skeptic will always find a reason, even if it's one the rest of us don't think is a good one. Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission--which is emotional connection."
"Changing behavior is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings. Both thinking and feeling are essential, and both are found in successful organizations, but the heart of change is in the emotions. The flow of see-feel-change is more powerful than that of analysis-think-change. These distinctions between seeing and analyzing, between feeling and thinking, are critical because, for the most part, we use the latter much more frequently, competently, and comfortably than the former."
"Emergent strategy is the view that strategy emerges over time as intentions collide with and accommodate a changing reality. Emergent strategy is a set of actions, or behavior, consistent over time, “a realized pattern [that] was not expressly intended” in the original planning of strategy. Emergent strategy implies that an organization is learning what works in practice. Given today’s world, I think emergent strategy is on the upswing.
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Henry’s emergent strategy ideas simply seem to be more relevant to the world we live in today – they reflect the fact that our plans will fail. This is not to say that planning isn’t useful, but other than some long term technology plans, the day of the 5 year and even 2 year plans has faded and emergent strategy is the reality in most industries that I work with. You must be much more fleet of foot, strategic flexibility is what we are looking for in most industries. The boundaries are more fluid now. For many, albeit not all, knowing what industry you are in is not as clear cut as it once was. This makes industry analysis less easy. The value chain (Moi ici: No meu trabalho é fundamental conhecer e caracterizar a cadeia da procura, o ecossistema da procura, muito mais do que a clássica cadeia de fornecimento) is now shared across firm boundaries and at times, in part, in common with competitors."
"Sometimes, even when an economic theory makes sense, its application cannot be imposed from a model, in a top-down manner, so one needs the organic self-driven trial and error to get us to it. For instance, the concept of specialization that has obsessed economists since Ricardo (and before) blows up countries when imposed by policy makers, as it makes the economies error-prone; but it works well when reached progressively by evolutionary means, with the right buffers and layers of redundancies. Another case where economists may inspire us but should never tell us what to do.".
"Pessoas de mais a queixarem-se e de menos a agir"Voltei a recordar esta frase, ontem à noite, ao ler isto no Caderno de Economia do Expresso, roubado em casa da minha mãe:
"Uma forma de o país sair mais rapidamente da crise é falarmos menos e trabalharmos mais? Não diria trabalhar mais, mas arriscar mais, ir à luta, fazer coisas diferentes, eventualmente errar e depois corrigir os erros, para podermos ir para a frente, apesar das dificuldades todas, que são imensas.Trecho retirado de "Em Portugal há um excesso de palavras, de opiniões, sobre tudo. Estou farto" (entrevista de Paulo Pereira da Silva, presidente da Renova)
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Deve-se trabalhar mais no sentido de aumentar a autoestima de Portugal?Alguma coisa tem de se fazer. Mas acho que mais do que falar, tem de se fazer. Dá-me a impressão, quando me pedem para falar em universidades, que há uma nova geração muito mais empresarial, com vontade de empreender. Há gente nova com graça, com ideias e com vontade de fazer coisas. Essa mentalidade mudou, se é por obrigação ou não é, não sei. E gosto disso."
"for many people, a wealth model built on chronic growth is no longer a desirable goal. They are deciding to opt out of this model by establishing "repair cafés" or "transition towns," communities that try to run things differently at the local level. But doubts about the growth dogma are even beginning to creep into politics.
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can there be prosperity without growth and growth without environmental damage? How can jobs be preserved in a stagnating or even a shrinking economy? How can a government service its debts in such an economy, especially as the population shrinks?
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The labor market he envisions is full of thriving repair and maintenance shops. He wants to see our society become more civilized with less: less material, less energy, less waste and less pollution. He also believes that resources should be managed more effectively. We should produce the kind of clothing, he argues, that can be handed down from one generation to the next instead of throwing things away after wearing them just a few times."
" “the core idea of strategy is to provide an overarching view on how a particular company is going to succeed in the marketplace.”
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strategy is really a “mindset” that views “business life as not entirely random; stochastic but not random. While it may be absolutely necessary to revisit and revise choices more often than convenient, the assumption holds that effortful, determined, revisable strategy is better than simply letting happen whatever will happen.”
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Strategy is about trying to take control and trying to win. Strategy is about trying to predict the future or at least enough of that future that will give you a competitive advantage. Strategy is about being specific. It is about helping you get from A to C by doing B. It’s about putting your cards on the table, placing your bets.
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More than choosing what to do, it is about choosing what NOT to do. Because today, more than ever, there are far more things that you could do — but shouldn’t. These things distract and create complexity. They take valuable time and resources away from what really matters. Strategy is about understanding what really matters and acting on it.
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strategy is about answering the following questions:
- What business or businesses should you be in?
- How do you add value to your businesses?
- Who are the target customers for your businesses?
- What are your value propositions to those target customers?
- What capabilities are essential to adding value to your businesses and differentiating their value propositions?"
"Quando pergunto a uma plateia de estudantes o que esperam da sua vida profissional, e um deles responde que isso depende do Primeiro Ministro ou do autarca local, renovo o amargo de boca que o conceito de Liberdade não atinge todos os cidadãos."E fiz logo o paralelismo com os empresários e, sobretudo com os líderes das associações empresariais.
"90 percent of retail sales growth in Britain, France and Germany between 2012 and 2016, or 91.5 billion euros, is expected to be online"Descubro, cada vez mais, empresas anónimas que há muito seguiram o conselho que este blogue veicula há muitos anos, quando ainda não era "in" dizê-lo, e fizeram "by-pass a este país".
"O modelo de negócios da Inditex, que assenta na recolha diária de informação sobre a preferência dos clientes nas seis mil lojas que tem nos cinco continentes, deixa um prazo de apenas duas a três semanas para a produção dos artigos de moda. Este segmento - o mais relevante em termos de valor para o grupo espanhol - é, por isso, fabricado em mercados próximos aos centros de abastecimento em Espanha, uma vez que as lojas têm de ser abastecidas duas vezes por semana.Rapidez, proximidade, pequenas séries... o futuro não só do têxtil mas de todos os sectores económicos. Imaginem que não existiam tantas barreiras a protegerem os incumbentes, nestes tempos de transformação até veríamos novos modelos de automóveis, não padronizados, a percorrerem as estradas.
Espanha, Portugal e Marrocos são responsáveis por este "aprovisionamento de proximidade", que representa 51% do volume total de 970 milhões de peças produzidas anualmente pelo gigante retalhista de vestuário. Deste lote da produção, quase um terço vem de fábricas portuguesas. "É um terço importante, sobretudo de peças de qualidade. A moda, em que as séries de produção são curtas, é a nossa fatia mais importante", disse esta segunda-feira o director de comunicação da Inditex, Jesús Echevarría."
"What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.Claro que para muito gente isto é perigosa propaganda em prol da precariedade laboral.
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If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say “it is a 401(k) world.” Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it.
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When I say that “everyone has to pass the bar now,” I mean that, as the world got hyperconnected, all these things happened at once: Jobs started changing much faster, requiring more skill with each iteration. Schools could not keep up with the competencies needed for these jobs, so employers got frustrated because, in a hyperconnected world, they did not have the time or money to spend on extensive training. So more employers are demanding that students prove their competencies for a specific job by obtaining not only college degrees but by passing “certification” exams that measure specific skills — the way lawyers have to pass the bar.
"That begins to describe the electronics farmer’s market
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It’s naive to think of labor costs as China’s chief advantage in hardware manufacturing. The main advantage of being at the center of the supply chain is the iteration speed it permits. Need to find a particular part to fit a particular housing? Just blew a board and need a replacement part? Looking for a variation of a certain component? Then literally walk across the street and go get it. Even if you’re in the heart of the Silicon Valley sitting inside a TechShop that’s not possible. Looking for a segmented LED display? How about browsing through a case full of 75 different ones on the spot. Not sure about using the part in production? Talk to the factory rep and maybe jump in a car to see the factory line.
Aside from selection and immediacy, it’s easier for local designers to build their prototypes using the exact same tools as the production line uses, thus side-stepping possible manufacturing problems down the road and avoiding costly redesigns that plague most hardware projects. It’s also much easier to identify and design around components that are more popular by looking at what’s on sale at local markets than by searching online.
Huaqiangbei is the electronics component mecca, but it’s just one small part of the Shenzhen ecosystem. “I’d never hand-soldier a board. I just send an Eagle file off and get the completed board back later that day for a few bucks.” The town is full of service firms that have the equipment, expertise and capacity to handle quick turnaround on basic needs."
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