Não creio que seja uma resposta linear imediata.

Ontem no JdN em "Exportações, emprego e emigração" sublinhei:

"Na última década a economia portuguesa sofreu uma série de choques externos que acentuaram os seus desequilíbrios. O alargamento e a maior abertura da UE à China colocaram em cheque a nossa especialização tradicional, comprometendo o crescimento económico. A maior crise desde 1929 deu uma facada adicional. O fraco crescimento que daqui resultou, em paralelo com o acesso a crédito barato, estiveram na origem do desequilíbrio externo e do desequilíbrio orçamental.
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Os dados de Março também revelaram que as exportações, que deviam estar a aumentar, estão a cair. (Moi ici: O que está a cair são as exportações de viaturas, não por falta de competitividade do sector em Portugal mas por falta de procura no mercado europeu)
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O principal problema que o país enfrenta neste momento não é a instabilidade dentro do Governo, nem a lentidão a que se está a processar a consolidação, é o facto de as medidas socialmente muito duras que estão a ser impostas não estarem a gerar o ajustamento da economia no sentido necessário. Portugal precisa de investir mais, produzir mais e exportar mais. E nada disto está a acontecer."

O último parágrafo fez-me voltar aos tempos de escola e ao meu Stephanopolous sobre Dinâmica de Sistemas.
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E quem é que disse que a economia sustentável que tem de ser criada e desenvolvida tem um comportamento linear?
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Se o governo torrasse mais uns milhões a "assar sardinhas com fósforos", apoiando a economia insustentável, a resposta seria muito mais rápida porque seria mais próximo da linearidade. Seria apoiar o uso insustentável de recursos já existentes. Recursos que estavam imobilizados e prontos para utilização.
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A economia sustentável que tem de ser criada e desenvolvida não aparece do pé para a mão, para além de depender muito da procura externa, os recursos não existem prontos para serem utilizados.

"Stressors are information"

Primeiro a "dor" vai ter de gerar informação.
Depois, a informação vai gerar acção.
Só a acção vai gerar hipóteses de mobilização de recursos.
Dessas hipóteses, algumas vão descobrir um retorno positivo e vão desenvolver-se, outras vão ter um retorno negativo inicial. Em resposta a esse retorno negativo inicial, algumas vão "pivotar" em busca de melhor ajuste com o mercado e outras vão morrer.
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Não creio que seja uma resposta linear imediata.

“Ready or not, here I come!”

À atenção das associações empresariais.

“Market transitions wait for no one.” Not for your customers. Not for your partners. Not for your competitors. And not for you. When the time comes, that sets the time. And just like when you were a kid playing hide and seek, there’s a voice that comes out of nowhere calling, “Ready or not, here I come!”

À atenção dos empresários.

"But step back and take stock. The world is more powerful than you. The market is more powerful than you. Your customers are more powerful than you. And the sum of all your partners and competitors—the ecosystem—is more powerful than you. And just to put the cap on it, nobody really cares about you except you."

À atenção de quem olha para as empresas como vacas leiteiras sempre à mão para impostar.
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Trecho retirado de "Escape Velocity - Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past" de Geoffrey A. Moore.

Promoção da concorrência imperfeita

Ideias que ajudam a crescer.

Curiosidade do dia

"We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.
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People should have three sources of variation in their income. The first one is their own business that they understand rather well. Focus on that. The second one is their savings. Make sure you preserve them. The third portion is the speculative portion: Whatever you are willing to lose, you can invest in whatever you want."

Trecho retirado de "Taleb: Government Deficits Could Be the Next 'Black Swan'"

Periferias

"Portugal será sempre um país periférico na produção de carros"

E será que um dia a produção de carros será ela própria periférica?

Teremos já passado o "peak car consumption" na Europa?

"You have to play what’s in front of you"

Uma excelente metáfora "Management vs Tonga"
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Primeiro, recordar que este blogue é mantido por um fan do balanced scorecard. Alguém que acredita no poder que a monitorização de indicadores alinhados com uma estratégia, pode dar a uma empresa.

"Now, in certain contexts, exclusively quantitative measurements are powerful decision aids, but we fall into trouble when we extend the context inappropriately, yet still maintain our absolute belief in the power of quantitative measurement.
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Fast forward to a tour of the Antipodes commencing with an opening game in Tonga. The 80 minute game was terminated after half an hour as we ran out of substitute players. We were just as fast, just as motivated as they were but we were also lighter by an average of 15 kg per player. The picture at the top says it all.
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We did not adjust. We had statistics on our side; we just had to try harder - and ultimately we failed. We had stuck to our plan because we were confident that measurements were tied to the cause and effect of success, and we refused to play what was in front us.
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Now, I often no longer provide the intellectual argument. Intellectual stimulation provokes thought, emotional stimulation provokes action.
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Sometimes you need to let the management team play the Tongans.
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In my experience running this exercise, it reveals to senior management the real power of narrative research, (Moi ici: Daí a importância do mapa da estratégia) and then prompts further discussion on the potential danger of making a measure a goal, and how measurement and flexibility should always be in harness. You have to play what’s in front of you."

"below everything else"

"10 Things Every Customer Wants"

"Why does a customer buy from one vendor rather than another? According to research recently conducted by The Rain Group (detailed report here), customers tend to buy from sellers who are superlative at the following tasks:"

Em décimo e último lugar temos:

"10. Provide Value That's Superior to Other Options
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And here, finally, at the No. 10 spot (below everything else) comes the price and how that price compares to similar offerings. Unless you can prove that buying from you is the right business decision for the customer, the customer can and should buy elsewhere."

Os "bean counters" da tríade não percebem isto.
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E você?
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E a sua empresa?

"Não veja televisão. Não veja as notícias! São um veneno!"

"The economy isn’t as important as you think it is. (Moi ici: A ideia da retoma, ou da recessão - "Não acredito em marés..."; "A retoma da economia" e "À espera da retoma")
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1. In any economy, some businesses will thrive while others suffer.
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Just because your traditional market is struggling doesn’t mean there aren’t other markets for you to serve. Whether you’re selling business to business or business to retail, there are buyers who are flourishing. Identify those buyers, market to them, and you, too, will flourish.
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2. People will pay extra for what they really want regardless of the economy.
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some buyers will forego eating out to be able to afford their dream trip. Others will postpone the trip to be able to eat out. Buyers will make adjustments in their spending habits, but they will spend, and handsomely, for the things they really value.
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3. Buyers’ natural styles don’t change just because the economy does.
Value buyers will always be value buyers, just as price buyers will always be price buyers. Price buyers will be looking for the best deal they can get even when they’re rolling in money. Value buyers, on the other hand, will forego some purchases during difficult times rather than sacrifice the things they value."

Na semana passada comecei um projecto numa empresa. Um dos empresários começou a falar da crise e do Gaspar, está tudo minado, não há saída... quando acabamos a sessão, baseada na análise de uma tabela SWOT, tinham-se identificadoe 2 ou 3 oportunidades que se podiam conjugar com pontos fortes. Tempo de arregaçar as mangas!
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O meu conselho foi logo:

"Não veja televisão. Não veja as notícias! São um veneno!"

Trechos retirados de "Pricing for Profit - How to Command Higher Prices for Your Products and Services" de Dale Furtwengler

Curiosidade do dia

Muito, muito interessante!
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"Caveat emptor.com"~

"Yet customers may feel it unfair for retailers to charge customers differently for the same product, based on hunches about how much they can be stung for.
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Maybe the rise of price-customisation software will spawn rival apps that help consumers defeat it, by disguising their trail of clicks. In the meantime, online shoppers might look at ways to avoid appearing like moneybags. Surf on a PC, not an Apple. Start by visiting a price-comparison site, then—on arrival on a seller's site—feign interest in its cheapest stuff. Having made your choice, dawdle on your way to the checkout page. The internet may make price discrimination easier for retailers; but in online stores, as in bricks-and-mortar shops, two can play at that game."

Quantos parêntesis conseguem identificar?

Ontem, no final de "A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte III)" escrevi:

"Se vamos a caminho de Mongo (o Estranhistão), se "we are all weird", se o futuro passa pela co-criação e pela co-produção, se o futuro passa pela customização e personalização, então, o futuro são os artesãos. O futuro é voltar ao passado, é desmassificar a produção, é olhar para a segunda metade do século XX e perceber o "post-war construct" como uma anormalidade histórica a que nos habituamos e que temos medo de abandonar porque é a conhecida."

Ao princípio da noite encontrei este texto "Back to the future: What if the ‘mass media’ era was just an accident of history?" onde se pode ler uma mensagem muito semelhante:

"The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media.
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“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, (Moi ici: Como escrevo aqui tantas vezes, Mongo é pós sociedade industrial) predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”
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If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.
And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times."

E seguindo este raciocínio, poderemos também falar de um "employment parenthesis"?

Apostar em nichos

"O ritmo da queda não deixa margem para dúvidas: em meados da década passada, havia 1800 videoclubes. Em 2010, eram 300. Até ao final de 2013, metade dos 100 que ainda resistem acabará provavelmente por fechar, antecipa Nuno Pereira.
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A curto prazo, o sector vai ficar reduzido a escassos sobreviventes, entre os quais aqueles que conseguirem dar a volta ao modelo de negócio tradicional, considera o responsável da Acapor. “Lojas de aluguer de vídeo, daqui a dois anos, não acredito que existam.
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A Cineteka começou no quarto de Gonçalo Peres, com um sistema que ainda hoje se mantém: as pessoas podem encomendar filmes pela Internet e estes são enviados por correio. Em 2006, a loja física abriu. É um espaço amplo, com dois andares. Em baixo, o videoclube, que também vende posters de filmes, acesso à Internet e ainda pastilhas elásticas e chocolates (uma receita “residual”, diz Bruno Mendes, outro dos sócios – estes produtos servem apenas para completar o serviço). No piso de cima há um café, cuja exploração está entregue a outra empresa.
“O negócio principal é o aluguer de filmes”, assegura Gonçalo Peres, que explica que a Cineteka se esforça por ter filmes de cinema alternativo e títulos antigos, que apelam a muitos dos clientes que têm. (Moi ici: Este é o pormenor que me captou a atenção. Num sector em queda, por perda da massa de clientes, há quem, em contracorrente tenha sucesso. Como? Apostando em nichos, servindo clientes-alvo... uma lição para os jornais, por exemplo) Para além do modelo tradicional de aluguer, a empresa oferece a possibilidade de assinaturas mensais."

Trechos retirados de "O filme dos videoclubes não tem um final feliz"

Tríade: bean counters

"There is a long history of companies that became obsessively focused on cost, at the expense of providing a product or service of value to the customer. The fact of the matter is you can make a pizza so cheap no one is willing to eat it.
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Cost accountants focus on the inside of an organization, yet all value takes place in the external world, beyond the four walls of the organization. By and large, accountants are not well equipped to judge and measure value, despite all the recent blather about activity-based costing.
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It is time we lay to rest cost-plus pricing, and for businesses to embrace The First Law of Marketing: All value is subjective. Pricing is far too important to be left to the worldview of the bean counters."

Trecho retirado de "The First Law of Marketing: All Value is Subjective"

Curiosidade do dia

" new study really helps to drive home how little patents have to do with innovation. Pointed out to us by James Bessen, the study looks at "R&D 100 Awards" from the academic journal, Research & Development from 1977 to 2004. As you might expect, the R&D 100 Awards are given out each year by the journal in an attempt to name the top 100 innovations of the year. If patents were instrumental in driving innovation, you'd certainly expect most of these innovations to be patented. .But you'd be wrong, as the reports authors, Roberto Fontana, Alessandro Nuvolari, Hiroshi Shimizu and Andrea Vezzulli, quickly discovered.
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A stunning 91% of all of the technologies receiving the prize were not actually patented. That's covering approximately 3,000 technologies winning this award as the most innovative advancement of the year over a period of about three decades."

Trecho retirado de "Over 90% Of The Most Innovative Products From The Past Few Decades Were NOT Patented"

A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte III)

Na sequência de "A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte II)" (Parte 0 e parte I).

"IT'S been one of the hottest economic questions for at least the last few decades: what sort of jobs will provide a comfortable, secure, middle-class lifestyle for the next generation of Americans?"

Qual seria a resposta se fosse procurada neste blogue?

"future “good” middle-class jobs will come from the re-emergence of artisans, or highly skilled people in each field. Two examples he mentioned: a contractor who installs beautiful kitchens and a thoughtful, engaging caregiver to the elderly. He reckons the critical thinking skills derived from a liberal arts education give people who do these jobs an edge. The labour market will reward this; the contractor who studied art history or the delightful caregiver with a background in theatre will thrive.
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This is consistent with a shift in the labour market I've observed. It seems the market now rewards individual more than firm-specific capital. That's economic jargon for the idea that it's better to be really good at your job than merely good at being an employee. There's less value in being the company man; you must be your own man possessing a dynamic skill set applicable in a variety of ways.
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What Mr Katz describes is a world where a good job is not lifetime employment, where your employer takes care of you from age 20 until death (with a very generous pension). He describes people responsible for their own economic destiny. That may seem unsettling, because the old regime appeared to offer more stability, though that stability may have been an illusion. Actually the new way may offer more certainty because people look out for themselves, rather than being vulnerable to changes that impact their employer. The nature of work constantly evolves. The company man was a post-war construct. The self-sufficient artisan is actually more consistent with historical labour markets.
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But in order to build your human capital and be that modern, competitive worker it seems you must believe you're a little special. The company man was content to be a cog in the machine, the modern worker must take pride in his talents.
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Believing you're exceptional and in control maybe a necessary characteristic of modern workers. But it must be balanced with realistic expectations and humility. It's not enough to take pride in what you do; modern workers must be open to applying their skills in a variety of different and ever-changing ways"

Se vamos a caminho de Mongo (o Estranhistão), se "we are all weird", se o futuro passa pela co-criação e pela co-produção, se o futuro passa pela customização e personalização, então, o futuro são os artesãos. O futuro é voltar ao passado, é desmassificar a produção, é olhar para a segunda metade do século XX e perceber o "post-war construct" como uma anormalidade histórica a que nos habituamos e que temos medo de abandonar porque é a conhecida.
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Trechos retirados de "The return of artisanal employment"

A "Via Negativa" (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.
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"what is called in Latin via negativa, the negative way, after theological traditions, particularly in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Via negativa does not try to express what God is - leave that to the primitive brand of contemporary thinkers and philosophasters with scientistic tendencies. It just lists what God is not and proceeds by the process of elimination.
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Recall that the interventionista focuses on positive action - doing. Just like positive definitions, we saw that acts of commission are respected and glorified by our primitive minds and lead to, say, naive government interventions that end in disaster, followed by generalized complaints about naive government interventions, as these, it is now accepted, end in disaster, followed by more naive government interventions. Acts of omission, not doing something, are not considered acts and do not appear to be part of one’s mission. ... I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.
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in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.
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So the central tenet of the epistemology I advocate is as follows: we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily."

Em vez de um cardápio de receitas intervencionistas, tão comum entre os socialistas do PSD e do CDS até aos do PS e PCP.
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Trechos retirados de "Antifragile" de Nassim Taleb.

Curiosidade do dia

"India is an ancient civilisation but a youthful country. Its working-age population is rising by about 12m people a year, even as China’s shrank last year by 3m. Within a decade India will have the biggest potential workforce in the world."

Trecho retirado de "What a waste"

A estabilidade é mesmo uma ilusão (parte II)

Parte 0 e parte I

"The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the American economy has more than twenty-one million “non-employer” businesses - operations without any paid employees. These include everything from electricians to computer consultants to graphic designers. Although these microenterprises account for only a modest portion of America’s gross domestic product, they now constitute the majority of businesses in the United States.
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The research firm IDC estimates that 30 percent of American workers now work on their own and that by 2015, the number of nontraditional workers worldwide (freelancers, contractors, consultants, and the like) will reach 1.3 billion. The sharpest growth will be in North America, but Asia is expected to add more than six hundred million new soloists in that same period.
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Some analysts project that in the United States, the ranks of these independent entrepreneurs may grow by sixty-five million in the rest of the decade and could become a majority of the American workforce by 2020. One reason is the influence of the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old generation as it takes a more prominent economic role. According to research by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 54 percent of this age cohort either wants to start their own business or has already done so.
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In sixteen Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries- including France, Mexico, and Sweden - more than 90 percent of businesses now have fewer than ten employees. In addition, the percentage of people who are either a “nascent entrepreneur or owner-manager of a new business” is far higher in markets such as China, Thailand, and Brazil than in the United States or the United Kingdom."

Recordar o que se escreve por aqui acerca de: Mongo; artesãos; prosumers e antifragilidade.
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Trecho retirado de "To sell is human : the surprising truth about moving others" de Daniel Pink.

Manxman

"Giro d'Italia 2013, stage six: Mark Cavendish prevails in sprint finish"

"before you can get better, you will need to get worse" ("Via Negativa" (parte II))

Dave Gray em "The Connected Company" descreve em linguagem corrente o que acontece às empresas e às economias dos países:

"Evolutionary biologists use something called a fitness landscape to represent the journey that organisms and organizations make as they negotiate tradeoffs between conflicting constraints and coevolve, trying to achieve optimal fitness for their environment. The journey is called an adaptive walk. As organisms make adaptive moves and countermoves, trading off one functional trait for another, they move upward on the landscape, toward an optimum fit. But with every move, those tradeoffs make it more and more difficult to go anywhere else but up toward the top of that particular peak. Eventually, you reach a point where you can’t go any farther up - or, you will have to go downhill before you can scale another peak. And that means that before you can get better, you will need to get worse.
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This adaptive walk toward fitness peaks is another way to visualize the experience curve and its diminishing returns. As you move upward toward an optimum - or peak - efficiency, there are fewer and fewer choices that will take you higher on the landscape, until you reach the top. And once you have reached a peak, moving in any direction will take you downhill.
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If you are at the top of a fitness peak and the landscape starts changing, it can really throw you off. Companies doing the right thing at the time - making the right moves for their situation, trying to optimize their production lines to squeeze out all the costs and inefficiencies so they can run lean and mean operations - may later find that they have optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."

Tínhamos um ecossistema de empresas de bens transaccionáveis adaptado a competir pelo baixo-preço e:

• A paisagem competitiva começou a acelerar a mudança quando o escudo deixou de dar boleias a clandestinos com a sua desvalorização deslizante;
• Acelerou ainda mais com a adesão dos países da Europa de Leste à UE;
• E sofreu um evento tipo-Fukushima com a adesão da China à OMC.

Estas alterações sucessivas da paisagem competitiva levaram os intervencionistas ingénuos nos vários governos a maquilharem os números do PIB e do desemprego com mais de uma década de investimento público com rentabilidades negativas, assaram sardinhas com o lume dos fósforos (recordar a argumentação do secretário de estado Paulo Campos).

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Recordando:

• "O modelo NK de Kauffman - uma introdução"
• "OMG... e vão viver de quê? (parte VIII) ou Mt 11, 25"
• "Muitos picos, muita arte"

Para muitas empresas, o que era um pico, transformou-se num vale, ou numa depressão, ou numa colina insignificante, para encontrar um novo pico, é preciso seguir um "adaptive walk" que terá de passar algures por "before you can get better, you will need to get worse", outra forma de dizer: ""Se tudo correr bem o desemprego vai aumentar""

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Quem disser o contrário, na situação, ou na oposição, mente com todos os dentes.

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A falta de dinheiro, e alguma, pouca, influência da troika, têm imposto a "Via Negativa"

Curiosidade do dia

"Em março de 2013 as exportações (para a UE) diminuíram 6,1% face ao mês homólogo de 2012, em especial devido à evolução registada nos Veículos e outro material de transporte (nomeadamente nos Automóveis de passageiros, nos Veículos automóveis para transporte de mercadorias e nas Partes e acessórios dos veículos automóveis) e nas Máquinas e aparelhos (principalmente nos Aparelhos recetores para radiodifusão).
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Em março de 2013 as exportações para os Países Terceiros (extra-UE) aumentaram 6,0% face a março de 2012, em resultado do acréscimo registado principalmente nos Combustíveis minerais e nos Metais comuns (nomeadamente Fio-máquina dos tipos utilizados para armaduras de betão)."

Será que o pior já passou?

• "Novo turno já trabalha na Peugeot Citroën de Mangualde"
• "Produção automóvel em Portugal cai 21,4% até Abril" ("no mês de Abril a produção automóvel aumentou 2,4% face ao período homólogo de 2012, concretizando-se em 14.066 veículos.") e "Fornecedores da Autoeuropa pedem ajuda ao Governo"